topic Re: Variable Combination Count in SAS Programming

Variable Combination Count

Aves9019 — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 20:03:57 GMT

Hi Everyone I have come across an issue that I was hoping someone could help me solve. I have a data set with 120 observations. I would like to see how many times various combinations of five variables present themselves within the data. According to my calculations there are 31 possible unique combinations of the 5 variables. What I would like to see is how many times each of these 31 combinations are present within these 120 observations. A table of the possible combinations is listed with the 5 variables represented as A, B, C, D, and E. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Re: Variable Combination Count

Reeza — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 20:15:41 GMT

What does your data actually look like? You can calculate the number of combinations via the comb() function.

data have;
do i=1 to 5;
x=comb(5,i);
y=sum(x,y);
output;
end;
run;

proc print data=have;run;

Counting the instances may be as simple as a proc freq.

Re: Variable Combination Count

Astounding — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 20:18:54 GMT

This should do it:

proc freq data=have;

tables a * b * c * d * e / missing list;

run;

The number of combinations of values could be much larger depending on what values your variables take on. But you'll see that soon enough.

Good luck.