The CLUSTER procedure in SAS/STAT software creates a dendrogram automatically. The black-and-white dendrogram is nice, but plain. A SAS customer wanted to know whether it is possible to add color to the dendrogram to emphasize certain clusters. For example, the plot at the left emphasizes a four-cluster scenario for clustering
A regular reader noticed my post on initializing vectors by using repetition factors and asked whether that technique would be useful to expand data that are given in value-frequency pairs. The short answer is "no." Repetition factors are useful for defining (static) matrix literals. However, if you want to expand
In a previous blog post, I described how to use a spread plot to compare the distributions of several variables. Each spread plot is a graph of centered data values plotted against the estimated cumulative probability. Thus, spread plots are similar to a (rotated) plot of the empirical cumulative distribution
Suppose that you have several data distributions that you want to compare. Questions you might ask include "Which variable has the largest spread?" and "Which variables exhibit skewness?" More generally, you might be interested in visualizing how the distribution of one variable differs from the distribution of other variables. The
Has anyone noticed that the REG procedure in SAS/STAT 12.1 produces heat maps instead of scatter plots for fit plots and residual plots when the regression involves more than 5,000 observations? I wasn't aware of the change until a colleague informed me, although the change is discussed in the "Details"
I've conducted a lot of univariate analyses in SAS, yet I'm always surprised when the best way to carry out the analysis uses a SAS regression procedure. I always think, "This is a univariate analysis! Why am I using a regression procedure? Doesn't a regression require at least two variables?"
At a recent conference, I talked with a SAS customer who told me that he was using an R package to create a three-panel visualization of a distribution. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the name of the package, and he has not returned my e-mails, so the purpose of today's article
PROC UNIVARIATE has provided confidence intervals for standard percentiles (quartiles) for eons. However, in SAS 9.3M2 (featuring the 12.1 analytical procedures) you can use a new feature in PROC UNIVARIATE to compute confidence intervals for a specified list of percentiles. To be clear, percentiles and quantiles are essentially the same
I often see variations of the following question posted on statistical discussion forums: I want to bin the X variable into a small number of values. For each bin, I want to draw the quartiles of the Y variable for that bin. Then I want to connect the corresponding quartile
I was recently asked how to compute the difference between two density estimates in SAS. The person who asked the question sent me a link to a paper from The Review of Economics and Statistics that contains several examples of this technique (for example, see Figure 3 on p. 16
In statistics, distances between observations are used to form clusters, to identify outliers, and to estimate distributions. Distances are used in spatial statistics and in other application areas. There are many ways to define the distance between observations. I have previously written an article that explains Mahalanobis distance, which is
A big part of "winning" these days (be it sports or a business) is performing analytics better than your competition. This is demonstrated in awe-inspiring fashion in the book (and movie) "Moneyball." And on that topic, I'd like to show you a few ways SAS can be used to analyze sports data
Someone recently asked a question on the SAS Support Communities about estimating parameters in ridge regression. I answered the question by pointing to a matrix formula in the SAS documentation. One of the advantages of the SAS/IML language is that you can implement matrix formulas in a natural way. The
Argh! I've just spilled coffee on output that shows the least squares coefficients for a regression model that I was investigating. Now the parameter estimate for the intercept is completely obscured, although I can still see the parameter estimates for the coefficients of the continuous explanatory variable. What can I
There is something for everyone at SAS Global Forum 2013. I like to attend presentations in the Statistics and Data Analysis track and talk with SAS customers in the SAS Support and Demo Area. But one activity that I enjoy the most is to stroll through the poster area and
A SAS user asked an interesting question on the SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics Support Forum. The question is: Does PROC SGPLOT support a way to display the slope of the regression line that is computed by the REG statement? Recall that the REG statement in PROC SGPLOT fits and displays
Last week the SAS Training Post blog posted a short article on an easy way to find variables in common to two data sets. The article used PROC CONTENTS (with the SHORT option) to print out the names of variables in SAS data sets so that you can visually determine
When a categorical variable has dozens or hundreds of categories, it is often impractical and undesirable to create a bar chart that shows the counts for all categories. Two alternatives are popular: Display only the Top 10 or Top 20 categories. As I showed last week, to do this in
Sometimes a categorical variable has many levels, but you are only interested in displaying the levels that occur most frequently. For example, if you are interested in the number of times that a song was purchased on iTunes during the past week, you probably don't want a bar chart with
It's the start of a new year. Have you made a resolution to be a better data analyst? A better SAS statistical programmer? To learn more about multivariate statistics? What better way to start the New Year than to read (or re-read!) the top 12 articles for statistical programmers from
In a recent article on efficient simulation from a truncated distribution, I wrote some SAS/IML code that used the LOC function to find and exclude observations that satisfy some criterion. Some readers came up with an alternative algorithm that uses the REMOVE function instead of subscripts. I remarked in a
Sometimes a graph is more interpretable if you assign specific colors to categories. For example, if you are graphing the number of Olympic medals won by various countries at the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to assign the colors gold, silver, and bronze to represent first-, second-, and third-place
The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually interesting graphics for the general public. However, because their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
Sometimes it is useful to group observations based on the values of some variable. Common schemes for grouping include binning and using quantiles. In the binning approach, a variable is divided into k equal intervals, called bins, and each observation is assigned to a bin. In this scheme, the size
With the US presidential election looming, all eyes are on the Electoral College. In the presidential election, each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has representatives in both congressional houses. (The District of Columbia also gets three electors.) Because every state has two senators, it
Robert Allison posted a map that shows the average commute times for major US cities, along with the proportion of the commute that is attributed to traffic jams and other congestion. The data are from a CEOs for Cities report (Driven Apart, 2010, p. 45). Robert use SAS/GRAPH software to
The other day I was using PROC SGPLOT to create a box plot and I ran a program that was similar to the following: proc sgplot data=sashelp.cars; title "Box Plot: Category = Origin"; vbox Horsepower / category=origin; run; An hour or so later I had a need for another box
I've seen analyses of Fisher's iris data so often that sometimes I feel like I can smell the flowers' scent. However, yesterday I stumbled upon an analysis that I hadn't seen before. The typical analysis is shown in the documentation for the CANDISC procedure in the SAS/STAT documentation. A (canonical)
To celebrate special occasions like Father's Day, I like to relax with a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. When I looked at the weather page, I was astonished by the seeming uniformity of temperatures across the contiguous US. The weather map in my newspaper was almost entirely yellow
The other day I encountered an article in the SAS Knowledge Base that shows how to write a macro that "returns the variable name that contains the maximum or minimum value across an observation." Some people might say that the macro is "clever." I say it is complicated. This is
