This week's SAS tip features scatterplots of ice cream data. Geoff Der and Brain Everitt and their book Basic Statistics Using SAS Enterprise Guide offer up many intriguing examples. Besides analyzing ice cream consumption, the authors use heights and resting pulse rates, horse race winners, and brain tumors to illustrate statistical techniques. Emphasizing the practical aspects of the analysis, the book shows how to conduct a wide range of statistical analyses without any SAS programming required.

To get the complete scoop, learn more about Geoff Der and Brian Everitt, as well as read a free chapter from their book.

The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Geoff Der and Brian Everitt and their book "Basic Statistics Using SAS Enterprise Guide: A Primer" Copyright © 2007, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (please note that results may vary depending on your version of SAS software)  

6.2.1 The Ice Cream Data: An Initial Analysis Using Scatterplots

The ice cream data in Table 6.1 are in a comma-separated file, icecream.csv, with the names of the variables, also comma-separated, in its first line. The data need to be imported to a SAS data set before they can be analyzed, but files of this type are very straightforward:

Some scatterplots of the three variables will be helpful in an initial examination of the data. For the scatterplots:

Repeat this with temperature having the role of Horizontal variable.

The resulting scatterplots are shown in Figures 6.1 and 6.2. The plots suggest that temperature is more influential than price in determining ice cream consumption with consumption increasing markedly as temperature increases.