topic Re: How to compute a variabel as the sum of other variables and ignore missing values in SAS Procedures

How to compute a variabel as the sum of other variables and ignore missing values

Biniie — Wed, 15 May 2019 14:50:58 GMT

I want to compute a new numeric variabel, "Psum", as the sum of 5 other numeric variable, P1, p2, p3, p4, p5. A simpel way to do it could be:

Psum= p1+p2+p3+p4+p5;

Some datalines includes missing values for the five variables, which will result in a missing value for the new variabel for these datalines.

Is there any way to get around this? I want to sum up the variabels, but I want SAS just to "ignore" if there is a missing value in one or more of the five variables and sum of the rest. I have thought about changning all the missing values in these 5 variable into the value of "0", but I would prefer to use a procedure that just ignores the missings values.

Re: How to compute a variabel as the sum of other variables and ignore missing values

Jagadishkatam — Wed, 15 May 2019 14:51:16 GMT

Please try the sum function as below

Psum= sum(of p1-p5);

Re: How to compute a variabel as the sum of other variables and ignore missing values

ballardw — Wed, 15 May 2019 16:08:01 GMT

And if you have actual variable names that are not as nice just list them in the sum function:

Psum = sum (thisvar, thatvar, somethingelse, othervar, varx);

If you are interested most of the basic statistics are available using similar syntax: N Mean Min Max Range STD Var (variance) Skewness and others.

Re: How to compute a variabel as the sum of other variables and ignore missing values

Biniie — Wed, 29 May 2019 17:36:54 GMT

Perfect, thanks!