Small multiples are one of the great ideas of graphics visionary Edward Tufte (e.g., in Envisioning Information). Briefly, the idea is that if many variations on a theme are presented, differences quickly become apparent. Today we offer general guida...

Usually, we're content to use a pseudo-random number generator. But sometimes we may want numbers that are actually random-- an example might be for randomizing treatment status in a randomized controlled trial.The site Random.org provides truly rando...

Tim Hesterberg has effectively argued for a larger role for resampling based inference in introductory statistics courses (and statistical practice more generally). While the Central Limit Theorem is a glorious result, and the Student t-test remarkabl...

How similar can a negative binomial distribution get to a Poisson distribution?When confronted with modeling count data, our first instinct is to use Poisson regression. But in practice, count data is often overdispersed. We can fit the overdispersio...

A number of analyses perform operations on subsets. Making it clear what observations have been excluded or included is helpful to include in the output.SASThe where statement (section A.6.3) is a powerful and useful tool for subsetting on the fly. (...

The Law of Large Numbers concerns the stability of the mean, as sample sizes increase. This is an important topic in mathematical statistics. The convergence (or lack thereof, for certain distributions) can easily be visualized in SAS and R (see also Horton, Qian and Brown, 2004).Assume that X1, X2, ..., Xn ...

The scatterplot in section 7.4 is a plot we could use repeatedly. We demonstrate how to create a macro (SAS, section A.8) and a function (R, section B.5) to do it more easily.SAS%macro logiplot(x=x, y=y, data=, jitterwidth=.05, smooth=50);data lp1;set...