topic Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot in SAS Procedures

Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

deleted_user — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:14:50 GMT

Is it possible in PROC GPLOT to plot dates along the x-axis as categorical variables instead of time-series? By doing this I would want dates that are 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year apart from each other to be plotted next to each other with the same amount of spacing between them.

I am doing this in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1.

Thanks,
Brad

Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

Peter_C — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:49:04 GMT

I recall defining axis or midpoints with [pre] "01jan2006"d to "01jan2008"d by month [/pre] which produces an unimportant message that the intervals are not equal.

Would something like that help ?

PeterC

Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

deleted_user — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:46:34 GMT

Thanks for the reply Peter,
I tried this and all I get is the same output as before, only now it only goes from Jan '06 to Jan '08.

My problem is that if I have 10 datapoints total that are being plotted and 6 points are in january '06 and my next 4 datapoints are in November '08 I'm getting a long straight line from the last datapoint in January until my first data point in November. I would like for this to plot the 10 points equidistant from each other instead of putting the time gap in between them (not sure if this is possible).

Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

sbb — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:21:45 GMT

Another option is to code your axis datapoints explicitly, noting that you can code them as a date literal, as well as stated previously with a date-range. Obviously, choosing the values to plot on the axis will be based on your own data and some calculated decision for your axis requirements.

Scott Barry
SBBWorks, Inc.

Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

deleted_user — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:54:49 GMT

Is there a way to code this dynamically so the dates to plot would change each time the process is run? I wont really know the exact dates that are going to need to be plotted, and there could be hundreds of them.
Thanks

Re: Categorical Date Variables in Line Plot

sbb — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:10:14 GMT

Not really and it depends. The "dynamic" part would need to be your own thought / code process based on the input data to be charted, as you have conveyed. And you would need to generate explicit (or range-of) values to plot on a given axis. Most likely that would be DATA step code and SAS statements to generate SAS code dynamically which you would then invoke.

Scott Barry
SBBWorks, Inc.