Language Reference

SKEWNESS (x) ;

This function is supported by the IML procedure and the iml action.

The SKEWNESS function is part of the IMLMLIB library. The SKEWNESS function returns the sample skewness for each column of a matrix. The sample skewness measures the asymmetry of a data distribution. Observations that are symmetrically distributed should have a skewness near 0.

The SKEWNESS function returns the same sample skewness as the UNIVARIATE procedure. For a formula, see the section "Descriptive Statistics" in the chapter "The UNIVARIATE Procedure" in Base SAS Procedures Guide: Statistical Procedures.

The following example computes the skewness for each column of a matrix:

x = {1 0,
     2 1,
     4 2,
     8 3,
    16 . };
skew = skewness(x);
print skew;