For far too long we have been using the venerable Scatter Plot to do the work of placing text strings in the graph. For far too long we have used the Scatter Plot or the Block Plot to place axis aligned text in the graphs. It is time to
A while back The Wall Street Journal published the article “Corporate Economists Are Hot Again“ that chronicles the resurgence of in-house economists in corporate America. The role of a corporate economist may bring about visuals of classic economist stereotypes (watch Ben Stein play to this stereotype as a teacher in
It’s back to school time which brings a flurry of emotions – sadness that the precious days of summer are over, joy that order and routine may be restored to your household and relief that you don’t have to figure out where your kids will be next week and beyond.
Last Monday I discussed how to choose the bin width and location for a histogram in SAS. The height of each histogram bar shows the number of observations in each bin. Although my recent article didn't mention it, you can also use the IML procedure to count the number of
When you create a histogram with statistical software, the software uses the data (including the sample size) to automatically choose the width and location of the histogram bins. The resulting histogram is an attempt to balance statistical considerations, such as estimating the underlying density, and "human considerations," such as choosing
SAS 9.4 maintenance release M2 was released early in August. This release contains some exciting new features in GTL and SG Procedures. In this article, I will describe some of the new options added to the existing plot statements. Note, I will use the SG examples here, but these are
Looking forward, ten of my SAS colleagues and I are heading to New York City this weekend for KDD 2014: Data Science for the Social Good, which runs August 24-27. This event’s full name is the 20th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,
It's easy to plot events that happened at a certain time, but what about events that extended over a range of dates, such as recessions? ... This blog post teaches you a nice trick to use for that! Let's say you have a plot of the labor force participation rate
Great news. If you’ve been struggling to import a Twitter stream as a data source, SAS Visual Analytics 6.4 has greatly simplified that task as part of this release’s expanded data import functionality. The first time you import tweets, you are directed to the Twitter website to log on to
My wife got one of those electronic activity trackers a few months ago and has been diligently walking every day since then. At the end of the day she sometimes reads off how many steps she walked, as measured by her activity tracker. I am always impressed at how many
Did you hear that Prince William is getting a new job? Next year, he’ll fly emergency helicopters for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. The prince, who’ll donate his salary to charity, called his new gig “one of the finest forms of public service.” The Duke of Cambridge won’t get any
If you read SAS blogs but never click through to the comment sections, you're missing some great information. Need proof? Check out some of these comments from the last few weeks. And then leave one of your own. Kelly McGuire has been studying the effects of negative hotel reviews online.
In a comment on last week’s blog asking SAS administrators: please submit your paper idea for SAS Global Forum 2015, Andrew Howell of ANJ Solutions asked if I had any statistics on which were the most popular SAS administrator papers for last year’s conference. He suggested the following nominations although
In a previous blog post, I showed how to use the graph template language (GTL) in SAS to create heat maps with a continuous color ramp. SAS/IML 13.1 includes the HEATMAPCONT subroutine, which makes it easy to create heat maps with continuous color ramps from SAS/IML matrices. Typical usage includes
If you’re anything like me, you are busy. Busy at work, busy at home, busy on the so-called weekend. It never stops. Even as a fitness professionals, my husband and I are right there with you in the constant struggle to find time to exercise and eat healthfully. Here are
If you're a really big company, with many locations around the country, how do you keep track of all that? ... With a great map, of course! I recently read a CNN article about the Community Health Systems network being hacked - exposing the names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays
Often there are questions from users on creating histogram using a Log X axis. One such question came up this weekend, where a user wanted a histogram of her data using log axis. Before we get into her specific case, let us first clarify what we may want to see
Before I started my internship with SAS, my only experience with data or analysis came from an “Introduction to Statistics” course I took freshman year to satisfy my math requirement. If I’d known then that statistics and knowing SAS programming would be the #1 skill for a bigger paycheck, or
Heat maps have many uses. In a previous article, I showed how to use heat maps with a discrete color ramp to visualize matrices that have a small number of unique values, such as certain covariance matrices and sparse matrices. You can also use heat maps with a continuous color
In her article Creating Spaghetti Plots Just got Easy, Lelia McConnell has provided us a glimpse into some new useful features in the SAS 9.4M2 release. The term Spaghetti plots generally refers to cases where time series plots have to be identified by multiple group classifications. The support for the
Are there times when you need to pass special characters to a macro variable but cannot find the right technique to accomplish the task? In this article I’ll discuss the different macro quoting functions and give a simple technique to help you determine which macro quoting function to use. Why
Find out which state you'll live in, if the US state borders are redrawn so we have 50 states with equal population! (Don't worry! - This is just a fun/hypothetical "what if" blog!) To get you in the mood for this topic, here's a picture of one of the many
In my industry of data and computer science, precision is typically regarded as a virtue. The more exact that you can be, the better. Many of my colleagues are passionate about the idea, which isn't surprising for a statistical software company. But in social media, precision is a stigma --
The SAS Global Forum 2015 Call for Papers opened the end of last month! I cannot believe it is time to start getting ready for the conference that will be in Dallas, TX on April 26-29, 2015. As part of the group from SAS who goes to the conference each
Ahhh, summer!! It’s such a beautiful time of year. All the fresh produce comes out of the fields at a rapid pace giving us an abundance of deliciousness and beautiful colors to thrill our bodies and souls.
One of the things I enjoy about blogging is that I often learn something new. Last week I wrote about how to optimize a function that is defined in terms of an integral. While developing the program in the article, I made some mistakes that generated SAS/IML error messages. By
This article is by guest contributor Lelia McConnell, SAS Tech Support. Creating Spaghetti Plots Just Got Easy Sample 38076: “Response by patient and treatment group” illustrates how to generate a spaghetti plot using the SGPLOT procedure. Sample 40255: “Plot of study results by treatment group” illustrates how to generate a
After the 2014 FIFA World Cup, one thing’s clear: here at SAS, we love football (soccer in the US!). To wrap up the popular 2014 World Cup data visualization series on the SAS Visual Analytics Community, we created a presentation that’s chocked-full of interesting insights. From the trillions of pieces
I’m sitting here staring at a book on my shelf entitled, “Impending Crisis”. Even knowing the copyright date, 2003, it could still be about any one of several possible crises: healthcare, financial, energy, education, environment. But no, in this case the impending crisis in question is provided by the subtitle: “Too many jobs,
This fall, you’ll be swept off your feet in the Windy City: The 2014 Midwest SAS User’s Group (MWSUG) takes place in Chicago from October 5-7. With 135 presentations in 11 different sections, you’ll have the chance to expand your SAS know-how and network with fellow SAS professionals.
