PharmaSUG 2012 conference drew to a close today, concluding two and a half days packed with papers, presentations, posters, hands-on demos and super demos by SAS staff. While the weather outside was a bit chilly from time to time, the conference what hopping with many user papers on how to
ODS Graphics system was initially motivated by the need for high quality graphs for SAS Base, STAT, and other analytical procedures. Use of SG Procedures, ODS Graphics Designer and GTL by users too has initially focused on analytical graphs. But just like wheels on carryon bags that started for the specific needs of flight
Creating a graph that looks nice, with readable, high resolution fonts is important and should be easy to do. With SG procedures and GTL, this is easy to do with a simple option, but not the default. Creating a high resolution (image) for a graph consumes higher system resources. When working on a graph,
Most users of the ODS Graphics system have probably had the need to adjust the dimensions of their graph output at times. The ODS GRAPHICS statement makes this easy to do. This statement supports the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= options. If you set just one of these, the system will calculate
The Adverse Event Timeline graph posted earlier used the MARKERCHAR option of the SCATTER plot to draw the AE names. This option places a center-justified label at the marker position. There is no option in SAS 9.2 version to right-justify the label. Hence, we have to compute an offset in data
The parable of beer and diapers is often related when teaching data mining techniques. Whether fact or fiction, a Heat Map is useful to view the claimed associations. A co-worker recently enquired about possible ways to display associations or dependency between variables. One option is to show the dependency as a node
A new book from SAS Press, "Statistical Graphics Procedures by Example" co-authored by Dan Heath and I has now been published (phew!). For both Dan and I, this was our first foray into writing a book, so it was highly educational to say the least. The key idea behind the presentation
Calendar Heatmaps are an interesting alternative view of time-series data. The measured value is displayed as color mapped cells in a calendar. Calendar Heatmaps can be easily created with SAS 9.3 using just the HEATMAPPARM, SERIESPLOT and BLOCKPLOT statements in GTL and some simple data manipulation. The example below shows
When viewing time series data, often we only want to see the trend in the data over time and we are not so concerned about the actual data values. With multiple time series plots, forecasting software can find clusters to help us view series with similar trends. Recently I saw a graph showing the trend of unemployment
The heatmap is a graphical representation of a table where colors are used to represent the values in the table. This is an effective graphic for finding the minimum and maximum values across the table and may surface patterns in the data. With the addition of the HEATMAPPARM statement to
In this blog we will discuss many aspects of the SG Procedures. This article will cover some basic features and workings of the SGPLOT procedure to establish a baseline. The single-cell graph is the work horse for data visualization. From the simple bar chart to the complex patient profiles for clinical
The display of statistics, aligned with graphical plot of the data, is a common requirement for graphs, especially in the Clinical Research domain. In the previous post on Discrete Offset, I used an example of the Lipid Profile graph. Now, let us use the same example and add the display of statistics in
You can still get a paper proposal in for SAS Global Forum 2012. All you need is an idea. And probably some data. And also, some techniques for analyzing that data. Oh, and some conclusions would be helpful as well. I know: you are a busy person! You might not
We ship many sample data sets with SAS products. By using well-understood sample data sets, we can teach concepts or show off product features without distracting the audience/students with data collection or prep. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work. But occasionally the sample data can cause a
One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. "Wait a minute," you're thinking, "weren't ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?" Yes, that's true. But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more
Rick Wicklin created his own list of Five Interface and Graphics Features that Everyone Can Use. It's a very good summary of what you'll immediately notice when you use analytics procedures in SAS display manager: cool graphs turned on by default. For SAS Enterprise Guide users, you won't see such
The ODS Graphics Designer allows you to design and build your own statistical graphs in SAS, without having to learn how to program in the new graph template language (GTL). The ODS Graphics Designer is a rich user interface that allows you to design these graphs based upon your own
Last week I talked about how I volunteered to serve as a judge for a middle-school science fair. As I expected, I enjoyed the experience quite a bit, and I hope the students got something positive from me as well. I evaluated several really impressive projects at the 7th grade
Here at SAS, we eat our own dogfood*. Actually, that's an understatement -- it's better to say that we feast on it. I've been using SAS 9.2 (released earlier this year) and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 (not yet released) for many months (years, actually) to accomplish several tasks, including to
