Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin

A dot plot in the sense of Wilkinson 1999 is a good alternative to a histogram or a boxplot, particularly for small data sets. This page provides a SAS macro for such dot plots. The macro has been developed as a student project for the course "Statistical Software" in the Bachelor program "Applied and Computational Mathematics" (information in German).

Download SAS macro dotplot.sas
Download example macro calls

Link to preprint of Wilkinson, L (1999). Dot plots. The American Statistician 53, 276-281.

Caution: Terminology is somewhat confusing:

• The Wilkinson dot plots differ from those proposed by Cleveland (Cleveland, W. S. (1985) The Elements of Graphing Data. Monterey, CA: Wadsworth.), for which Michael Friendly provides the SAS macro DOTPLOT.SAS!
  Both Wilkinson and Cleveland dot plots can also be done in R:
  Cleveland dot plots: function dotchart
  Wilkinson dot plots: function dotPlot in package BHH2
• There is a further type of dot plot for visualizing patterns (cf. e.g. this link).