Jul

31

Sometimes, you can just eyeball it.

Really, if something truly is an outlier, you ought to be able to spot it. Take this plot, for example.

plot with 3 large bars and a few outliers

It should be pretty obvious that the vast majority of our sample for the Fish Lake game were students in grades, 4, 5 and 6. Those in the lower grades are clearly exceptions. I don’t know who put 0 as their grade, because I doubt any of our users had no education.

I use these plots especially if I’m explaining why I think certain records should be deleted from a sample. For many people, it seems as if the visual representation makes it clearer that “some of these things don’t belong here.”

Did you know that you can get a plot from PROC FREQ just by adding an option, like so:

PROC FREQ DATA= datasetname ;

TABLES variable / PLOTS=FREQPLOT ;

This will produce the frequency plot seen above, as well as a table for your frequency distribution.

Well, if you didn’t know, now you know.


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