Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 6, 2012 0

Backup or copy all components of your stored process before making changes

What if you would like to make a copy of an existing stored process to test out your changes before making them live? The copy command is available from within  SAS Management Console or from the SAS Enterprise Guide Open Stored Process GUI as seen below (note you can only

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeJune 3, 2012 0

Broken Y-Axis with SAS 9.2

In the previous post on Broken Y-Axis, I reviewed different ways to display data as a Bar Chart, where the response values for some categories are many orders of magnitude larger than the other values.  These tall bars force  the display of other values to be squeezed down thus making it harder to compare

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 31, 2012 0

Broken Y-Axis

Often we want to display data as a bar chart where a few observations have large values compared to the rest.  Comparison between the smaller values becomes hard as the small bars are squeezed by the tall bars.  Here is an example data, and a bar chart showing the data. The large values

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 28, 2012 0

Bivariate response graph

Recently, I came across an interesting graph showing Euro contries bank exposuro to GIIPS countries, as percent of GNP.  Here is the graph: I thought I would see how far I can get in making a similar graph using SAS.  I made up some data with response values for a Product x

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 25, 2012 0

Dual category variable graph

This post is a result of an intriguing question posed by a user on the SAS communities' page.  How to create a bar chart where the category is a combination of two variables var_1 and var_2 (each with values of '+' and '-'), and get a X axis that shows each

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 20, 2012 0

Graph size for presentations

At SAS Global Forum, and again at PharmaSUG, we had the pleasure of attending many papers and presentations on various topics that included graphs in the power point decks or in the papers.   More often than not, the graphs exist along other text, and occupy a smaller part of the screen

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 17, 2012 0

PharmaSUG 2012 update

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

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Data Visualization

Prashant HebbbarMay 7, 2012 0

'Unbox' Your Box Plots

At the 2012 SAS Global Forum, one of the questions from a user was about showing the original data used for the box plot. While you can use outliers in conjunction with the box features to get a feel for the data, for some situations you may need to see exactly

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMay 3, 2012 0

Graphs with log axis

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

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 30, 2012 0

Axis values and hint

Getting the axis values just right generally requires some work, and the values you want can change from case to case.  One such example was discussed by Dan Heath in his post on custom axis values.  Here Dan shows the usage of non uniform axis values using the VALUES option on

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 25, 2012 0

Bar chart with log response axis

Creating bar charts with log response axis has come up a few times in the past few days.  Before we look into how we could do this, it would be worth pointing out the considerable opinion in the blogosphere against use of log response axes for bar charts.  See BizIntelGuru and

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 23, 2012 0

SAS Global Forum Monday update

On Friday before the conference, I presented a 1 day "developer led" seminar on SG Procedures and GTL, along with a discussion of new features for SAS 9.3.  The experience was very gratifying as all users were now using SAS 9.2, and some were using SAS 9.3.  We had a lively

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 20, 2012 0

Just a legend, please

Recently, an interesting question was posed on the previous article on this blog by a reader.  Can we use the new DiscreteAttrMap feature to create just a legend with specific entries, with no graph.  The question was intriguing enough that I did not wait to ask - "Why?".  I just got

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 20, 2012 0

What would SAS Stored Process Key #51 be?

This past Monday, Tricia and I released our 2nd book this year. "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" provides a step-by-step approach to transitioning from SAS code into user driven (prompted) stored processes. Trimming down all the things you can do with SAS Stored Processes is next to

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 19, 2012 0

Hi ho, hi ho, its off to SASGF we go

SAS Global Forum 2012 at Orlando, Florida is just round the corner and we are excited to see so many presentations offered by users on SG procedures and GTL.   We'll add a few more on new SAS 9.3 features of SG procedures and GTL.   These include cluster groups for discrete and interval axes, cluster

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 16, 2012 0

All the possible uses for PROC STP

PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 16, 2012 0

Bar chart on interval axis

Recently, a user asked about creating a Bar Chart of Value by Date, where the dates are displayed on a scaled interval axis.   Consider this simulated data set of value by date and treatment shown below.  This data set only has one value for each date and treatment combination. We can use the VBAR statement

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 9, 2012 0

Simpler is better

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

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeApril 2, 2012 0

Bar-Line graph

A user recently posted a question in the SAS communities forum about  how to best display two measures by one classifier using a Bar-Line graph, where the scale of the two measures is vastly different.  This got me thinking about various different ways to represent such data.  Here are some of my thoughts,

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMarch 30, 2012 0

Cluster groups

The topic of cluster groups comes up often.  By cluster group I am referring to the feature in bar charts where the group values are displayed side by side. With SAS 9.3, SG Procedures support stack or cluster grouping for Bar Charts and overlay or cluster grouping for all other

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMarch 26, 2012 0

Let them eat pie

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

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMarch 22, 2012 0

High resolution graphs

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,

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMarch 18, 2012 0

Graphs with class

When the data is classified by multiple class variables, you can certainly create graphs using BY variables.  This results in separate graphs, one for each level of the BY variable crossings.  Each graph is scaled by its own data subset, and comparisons across BY levels is harder. When comparisons need to be

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 16, 2012 0

Stop recreating the wheel, save those common joins into a permanent view

When you are constantly taking the data tables and completing joins to begin working on your reports or analysis it might be time to consider creating permanent views. Then you can just add the view to the Enterprise Guide project rather than dealing with the joins in a Query Builder

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 14, 2012 0

Why code when %_eg_WhereParam does the work for you?

After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special

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Data Visualization

Prashant HebbbarMarch 12, 2012 0

Scaling the graphical heights

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

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Data Visualization

Sanjay MatangeMarch 8, 2012 0

Adverse event timeline - revisited

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

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 7, 2012 0

Use SAS Enterprise Guide to quickly understand a new data set

During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 6, 2012 0

A poor man's approach to fuzzy data matching

Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated

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Data Visualization

Pratik PhadkeMarch 5, 2012 0

Proportionally sized bubble plots

Bubble plots are often used to display social and economic data as Gapminder effectively does. With the addition of the BUBBLEPLOT statement to SAS 9.3, it is now possible to create bubble plots in SAS with a few lines of code: proc template; define statgraph bplot; begingraph; entrytitle 'Bubble Plot

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