@DocMartin wrote:
. 2. Looked at observation #1991 to see if it differed substantially from the others.
Depending on how you look at this record and compare with the remaining what you see may not be what the algorithms see.
If you have a variable with a format assigned with the other option in proc format it may be that a view in a table or proc print does not show an extreme value.
proc format library=work;
value extreme
0-100 = [f5.2]
other = 100;
run;
data example;
do x= 1,10,99.4, 10e18;
output;
end;
format x extreme.;
run;
proc print data=example noobs;
run;
Or perhaps no single value is extreme but you have added a combination of values that might be considered an outlier that requiring many more iterations to solve.
I would suggest splitting the data into two pieces without about half the records in each and see if the reduced set with the problem record continues to be a problem. I suspect it may. Were there any interesting items in the log for the longer run that don't appear in the shorter?
Without seeing code to know how many variables from your set are being used to create the parameters it is hard to see if a specific minimum sized data set would be needed.
