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Introduction

As you have seen, one of the many features of PROC REPORT is the ability to summarize large amounts of data by producing descriptive statistics. However, there are SAS procedures that are designed specifically to produce various types of descriptive statistics and to display them in meaningful reports. The type of descriptive statistics that you need and the SAS procedure that you should use depend on whether you need to summarize continuous data values or discrete data values.

If the data values that you want to describe are continuous numeric values (for example, people's ages), then you can use the MEANS procedure or the SUMMARY procedure to calculate statistics such as the mean, sum, minimum, and maximum.


Variable N Mean Std Dev Minimum Maximum
Age
Height
Weight
Pulse
FastGluc
PostGluc		 20
20
20
20
20
20		 47
67
175
75
299
355		 13
4
36
8
126
126		 15
61
102
65
152
206		 63
75
240
100
568
625


If the data values that you want to describe are discrete (for example, the color of people's eyes), then you can use the FREQ procedure to show the distribution of these values, such as percentages and counts.



Eye
Color 		Frequency Percent Cumulative
Frequency		 Cumulative
Percent
Brown 92 58.60 92 58.60
Blue 65 41.40 157 100.00


This lesson will show you how to use the MEANS, SUMMARY, and FREQ procedures to describe your data.



Time to Complete

This lesson contains pages and takes approximately 1 hour to complete.


Objectives

In this lesson, you learn to

  • determine the n-count, mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum of numeric variables using the MEANS procedure
  • control the number of decimal places used in PROC MEANS output
  • specify the variables for which to produce statistics
  • use the PROC SUMMARY procedure to produce the same results as the PROC MEANS procedure
  • describe the difference between the SUMMARY and MEANS procedures
  • create one-way frequency tables for categorical data using the FREQ procedure
  • create two-way and n-way crossed frequency tables
  • control the layout and complexity of crossed frequency tables.

Prerequisites

Before taking this lesson, you should complete the following lessons:

  • .

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