11.2 - Specifying Statistics

The default statistics that the MEANS procedure produces — N, mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum — might not be the ones that you actually need. You might prefer to limit your output to just the mean and standard deviation of the values. Or you might want to compute a completely different statistic, such as the median or range of values.

In order to tell SAS to calculate summary statistics other than those calculated by default, simply place the desired statistics keywords as options in the PROC MEANS statement.

Example 11.6 Section

The following program tells SAS to calculate and display the sum, range, and median of the red blood cell counts appearing in the icdb.hem2 data set:

PROC MEANS data=icdb.hem2 fw=10 maxdec=2 sum range median;
    var rbc;
RUN;

The MEANS Procedure

Analysis Variable : rbc

Sum

Range

Median

2816.23

2.83

4.41

Launch and run  the SAS program, and review the output to convince yourself that the report is generated as described. You might want to note, in particular, that when you specify a statistic in the PROC MEANS statement, the default statistics are not produced. Incidentally, you can generate the exact same report using the SUMMARY procedure, providing you again add the PRINT option to the end of the PROC statement.

The following keywords can be used with the MEANS and SUMMARY procedures to compute statistics:

Descriptive Statistics

Keyword

Description

CLM

Two-sided confidence limit for the mean

CSS

Corrected sum of squares

CV

Coefficient of variation

KURT

Kurtosis

LCLM

One-sided confidence limit below the mean

MAX

Maximum value

MEAN

Average value

MIN

Minimum value

N

No. of observations with non-missing values

NMISS

No. of observations with missing values

RANGE

Range

SKEW

Skewness

STD

Standard deviation

STDERR

Standard error of the mean

SUM

Sum

SUMWGT

Sum of the Weight variable values

UCLM

One-sided confidence limit above the mean

USS

Uncorrected sum of squares

VAR

Variance

Quantile Statistics

Keyword

Description

MEDIAN or P50

Median or 50th percentile

P1

1st percentile

P5

5th percentile

P10

10th percentile

Q1 or P25

Lower quartile or 25th percentile

Q3 or P75

Upper quartile or 75th percentile

P90

90th percentile

P95

95th percentile

P99

99th percentile

QRANGE

Difference between upper and lower quartiles: Q3-Q1

Hypothesis Testing

Keyword

Description

PROBT

Probability of a greater absolute value for the t value

T

Student's t for testing that the population mean is 0