The PharmaSUG 2013 conference in Chicago this week was awesome. From the perspective of graphics, there was great interest in using SG Procedures, Designer and GTL for building clinical graphs. It was nice to see many papers by users on how they are using these tools for creating graphs on a daily
You created a graph of Response over Time by Severity where Severity has three levels, "Severe", "Moderate' and "Mild". How do you ensure that "Severe" is always red in your graph, regardless of the data order? Normally, when creating any graph with a GROUP role, the distinct group values are assigned the style
A frequent question we get from users is how to create a box plot with custom whiskers lengths. Some want to plot the 10th and 90th percentile, while other want the 5th and 95th percentiles. The VBOX statement in the SGPLOT procedure does not provide for custom whiskers. Also, unlike GTL,
SG procedures and GTL use a collision avoidance algorithm to position data labels for a scatter or series plot. This is enabled by default. The label is preferably placed at the top right corner of the marker. The label is moved to one of the eight locations around the marker to
A parametric bar chart in SG Procedure and GTL parlance is a simplified version of the regular bar chart, where the data is assumed to be summarized prior to its usage inside the SG procedures or GTL. So, multiple occurrences of the same category and / or group combination is
John D. Cook shared a picture of "pretty squiggles" on his blog, as well as a prose description of the mathematics behind it. I'm more of a programmer than a mathematician, but I've attempted to transcribe his description into a SAS program. I used DATA step to generate the point
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
Recently I posted an article on this blog on how to create bar charts with log response axes in response to a question by a user. This generated some feedback suggesting that bar charts should not be used with log response axes or with a baseline of anything other than
A recent article in the SAS and R blog was about current winter temperatures in Albany, NY. The temperature data for the recent winter (Dec 2011 - Mar 2012) was plotted on a polar graph. Robert Allison posted an article on displaying the same data as a Polar Graph using SAS/GRAPH . Here is his
How to write a SAS macro program to repeat your SAS processing for each value of a BY grouping variable.
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 graph showing the distribution of the maximum liver function test values by treatment for all participants in a study is commonly used for the analysis of safety data in clinical trials. The data is often structured in multiple columns (one per treatment) as below on the left, or grouped by
So many of us struggle with this mountain. In fact, 68.27% of us get within sight of reaching the summit (while 95.47% of us are at least on a perceivable slope). We run, walk, crawl and sometimes slide our way uphill (from one direction or the other) until we finally
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
I've been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I've come across a few SAS programs that have "opportunity for improvement" when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven't, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite
It turns out that I'm not receiving the maximum potential value from my Netflix streaming service. Perhaps it's because I place too much value on sleep. With my monthly subscription, I am permitted to view Netflix content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In my house I have
Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the
Earlier today, Rick posted interesting information about which time of year the most babies are born, at least in the USA. I don't have data nearly as extensive as what's available at the NCHS, but I do have a sample of birthday records to compare against Rick's findings. My sample
This morning I delivered a talk to visiting high school students at the SAS campus. The topic: using SAS to analyze Twitter content. Being teenagers, high school students are well familiar with Twitter. But this batch of students was also very familiar with SAS, as they all have taken SAS
It's almost 2011, so let's reflect on the top 11 posts (by number of visits in 2010) on this blog. Not all of these posts were written in 2010; in fact, some of these date back to 2007. But apparently they are oldies and goodies. 1. SAS 9.2 and SAS
My family and I attended the North Carolina State Fair on Tuesday (weather was beautiful), and noticed two differences from previous years: Everything was more expensive -- getting in, riding the rides, and especially the food. It was easier to get around, because it wasn't so crowded. We didn't have
Like millions of Americans, I watched the vice presidential debate on television last night. I also watched it on Twitter -- which is to say that while watching the debate, I watched the real-time responses of hundreds of Twitter users. Twitter users, as you may know, have up to 140
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
At SAS Global Forum last week, a customer approached me with a very specific request. The conversation went something like this: Customer: My client demands a bar chart that uses a bar for one response, and a symbol for other responses, all on the same chart. We know it's possible
