A SAS programmer asked how to display long labels at irregular locations along the horizontal axis of scatter plot. The labels indicate various phases of a clinical study. This article discusses the problem and shows how to use the FITPOLICY=STAGGER option on the XAXIS or X2AXIS statement to avoid collisions
For a linear regression model, a useful but underutilized diagnostic tool is the partial regression leverage plot. Also called the partial regression plot, this plot visualizes the parameter estimates table for the regression. For each effect in the model, you can visualize the following statistics: The estimate for each regression
The ODS GRAPHICS statement in SAS supports more than 30 options that enable you to configure the attributes of graphs that you create in SAS. Did you know that you can display the current set of graphical options? Furthermore, did you know that you can temporarily set certain options and
When creating bar charts, it is very common to display labels with the bars to make it easier to determine the bar values or to provide additional information in the chart. However, these labels can take away valuable data space, particularly if you generate a smaller-sized graph. As you see
Recently, I showed how to use a heat map to visualize measurements over time for a set of patients in a longitudinal study. The visualization is sometimes called a lasagna plot because it presents an alternative to the usual spaghetti plot. A reader asked whether a similar visualization can be
Oh, no! Your boss just told you to change the way that SAS displays certain features in graphs, such as missing values. But you have a library of hundreds of SAS programs! Do you need to modify all of your previous programs? Fortunately, the answer is no. SAS provides ODS
In an article about how to visualize missing data in a heat map, I noted that the SAS SG procedures (such as PROC SGPLOT) use the GraphMissing style element to color a bar or tile that represents a missing value. In the HTMLBlue ODS style, the color for missing values
Longitudinal data are measurements for a set of subjects at multiple points in time. Also called "panel data" or "repeated measures data," this kind of data is common in clinical trials in which patients are tracked over time. Recently, a SAS programmer asked how to visualize missing values in a
A SAS programmer asked an interesting question: If data in a time series has missing values, can you plot a dashed line to indicate that the response is missing at some times? A simple way to achieve this is by overlaying two lines. The first line (the "bottom" line in
Some colors have names, such as "Red," "Magenta," and "Dark Olive Green." But the most common way to specify a color is to use a hexadecimal value such as CX556B2F. It is not obvious that "Dark Olive Green" and CX556B2F represent the same color, but they do! I like to
Last year, I wrote almost 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. My most popular articles were about data visualization, statistics and data analysis, and simulation and bootstrapping. If you missed any of these gems when they were first published, here are some of the most popular articles from 2021:
In a previous article, I visualized seven Christmas-themed palettes of colors, as shown to the right. You can see that the palettes include many red, green, and golden colors. Clearly, the colors in the Christmas palettes are not a random sample from the space of RGB colors. Rather, they represent
In data visualization, colors can represent the values of a variable in a choropleth map, a heatmap, or a scatter plot. But how do you visualize a palette of colors from the RGB or hexadecimal values of the colors? One way is to use the HEATMAPDISC subroutine in SAS/IML, which
Given a cloud of points in the plane, it can be useful to identify the convex hull of the points. The convex hull is the smallest convex set that contains the observations. For a finite set of points, it is a convex polygon that has some of the points as
I was recently asked how to create a frequency polygon in SAS. A frequency polygon is an alternative to a histogram that shows similar information about the distribution of univariate data. It is the piecewise linear curve formed by connecting the midpoints of the tops of the bins. The graph
A SAS programmer asked whether it is possible to add reference lines to the categorical axis of a bar chart. The answer is yes. You can use the VBAR statement, but I prefer to use the VBARBASIC (or VBARPARM) statement, which enables you to overlay a wide variety of graphs
Graphing data is almost always more informative than displaying a table of summary statistics. In a recent article about "dynamite plots," I briefly mentioned that graphs such as box plots and strip plots are better at showing data than graphs that merely show the mean and standard deviation. This article
A statistical programmer asked how to simulate event-trials data for groups. The subjects in each group have a different probability of experiencing the event. This article describes one way to simulate this scenario. The simulation is similar to simulating from a mixture distribution. This article also shows three different ways
A colleague spent a lot of time creating a panel of graphs to summarize some data. She did not use SAS software to create the graph, but I used SAS to create a simplified version of her graph, which is shown to the right. (The colors are from her graph.)
A colleague spent a lot of time creating a panel of graphs to summarize some data. She did not use SAS software to create the graph, but I used SAS to create a simplified version of her graph, which is shown to the right. (The colors are from her graph.)
This article shows how to create a "sliced survival plot" for proportional-hazards models that are created by using PROC PHREG in SAS. Graphing the result of a statistical regression model is a valuable way to communicate the predictions of the model. Many SAS procedures use ODS graphics to produce graphs
In a previous article, I discussed a beautiful painting called "Phantom’s Shadow, 2018" by the Nigerian-born artist, Odili Donald Odita. I noted that if you overlay a 4 x 4 grid on the painting, then each cell contains a four-bladed pinwheel shape. The cells display rotations and reflections of the pinwheel. The
This article shows how to estimate and visualize a two-dimensional cumulative distribution function (CDF) in SAS. SAS has built-in support for this computation. Although the bivariate CDF is not used as much as the univariate CDF, the bivariate version is still a useful tool in understanding the probable values of
It can be frustrating to receive an error message from statistical software. In the early days of the SAS statistical graphics (SG) procedures, an error message that I dreaded was ERROR: Attempting to overlay incompatible plot or chart types. This error message appears when you attempt to use PROC SGPLOT
Most introductory statistics courses introduce the bar chart as a way to visualize the frequency (counts) for a categorical variable. A vertical bar chart places the categories along the horizontal (X) axis and shows the counts (or percentages) on the vertical (Y) axis. The vertical bar chart is a precursor
A previous article discusses how to interpret regression diagnostic plots that are produced by SAS regression procedures such as PROC REG. In that article, two of the plots indicate influential observations and outliers. Intuitively, an observation is influential if its presence changes the parameter estimates for the regression by "more
When you fit a regression model, it is useful to check diagnostic plots to assess the quality of the fit. SAS, like most statistical software, makes it easy to generate regression diagnostics plots. Most SAS regression procedures support the PLOTS= option, which you can use to generate a panel of
This article shows how to use PROC SGPLOT in SAS to create the scatter plot shown to the right. The scatter plot has the following features: The colors of markers are determined by the value of a third variable. The outline of each marker is the same color (such as
I recently learned about a new feature in PROC QUANTREG that was added in SAS/STAT 15.1 (part of SAS 9.4M6). Recall that PROC QUANTREG enables you to perform quantile regression in SAS. (If you are not familiar with quantile regression, see an earlier article that describes quantile regression and provides
I recently wrote about a simple statistical formula that approximates the wind chill temperature, which is the cumulative effect of air temperature and wind on the human body. The formula uses two independent variables (air temperature and wind speed) to predict the wind chill temperature. This article describes how to
