SG Techniques: Telling the Story Even Better!
Chuck Kincaid · 2011
The SAS™ Statistical Graphics (SG) procedures: SGPLOT, SGPANEL, SGSCATTER, and SGRENDER are exciting additions in 9.2 that give easy access to some of the power of the Graphics Template Language (GTL) in much the same way that macros can give a novice access to advanced Base SAS programming. As good as these procedures are in helping you tell your analytical story, and they are good, there are techniques that can add extra value to your graphs. This paper will discuss three concepts – level ordering, banking, and slicing – introduced by William S. Cleveland in his book Visualizing Data. Ordering the levels and cells in a plot can add another level of information to the plots. Banking is a technique that enhances the reader’s ability to visually judge lines in the plot. Finally, slicing is a technique that allows a quantitative variable to be used to define the cells of the panel. For these techniques, we will explain the concepts, provide examples and outline the basic algorithms in this paper. The audience for this presentation is the statistician or business analyst who wants to tell their story even better.