The SURVEYIMPUTE Procedure

CLASS Statement

  • CLASS variable <(options)> …<variable <(options)>> </ options>;

The CLASS statement names the classification variables for the analysis. Most options can be specified either as individual variable options or as global options. You can specify options for each variable by enclosing the options in parentheses after the variable name. You can also specify global options for the CLASS statement by placing the options after a slash (/). Global options are applied to every variable that is specified without an option in the CLASS statement. However, individual CLASS variable options override the global options.

You can specify the following options either as global options or as individual options:

DESCENDING
DESC

reverses the sort order of the classification variable. If you specify both the DESCENDING and ORDER= options, PROC SURVEYIMPUTE orders the categories according to the ORDER= option and then reverses that order.

ORDER=DATA | FORMATTED | FREQ | INTERNAL

specifies the sort order for the levels of classification variables.

The following table shows how PROC SURVEYIMPUTE interprets values of the ORDER= option:

Value of ORDER= Levels Sorted By
DATA Order of appearance in the input data set
FORMATTED External formatted values, except for numeric variables with no explicit format, which are sorted by their unformatted (internal) values
FREQ Descending frequency count; levels with more observations come earlier in the order
INTERNAL Unformatted value

By default, ORDER=FORMATTED. For ORDER=FORMATTED and ORDER=INTERNAL, the sort order is machine-dependent. When ORDER=FORMATTED is in effect for numeric variables for which you have supplied no explicit format, the levels are ordered by their internal values. For ORDER=FREQ, the frequency counts are unweighted. For more information about sort order, see the chapter on the SORT procedure in the Base SAS Procedures Guide and the discussion of BY-group processing in SAS Programmers Guide: Essentials.

TRUNCATE <=n>

specifies the length n of CLASS variable values to use in determining CLASS variable levels. The default is to use the full formatted length of the CLASS variable. If you specify the TRUNCATE option without the length n, the first 16 characters of the formatted values are used. The TRUNCATE option is available only as a global option.

Last updated: December 09, 2022