I'm trying to parameterise a simple model in such a way that there are no corner constraints in the Solution for Fixed Effects table. That is, so there are no reference groups and each parameter is its own estimate, rather than the difference from the last parameter. I thought the NOINT option would do this for me, and for the first photo, you can see I get what I want. I want to be able to interpret each parameter directly from the Solutions table, and then create my own contrasts if I choose to. You can see from photo 1 that I can remove the intercept and then use the ESTIMATE statement to determine the difference between the first and last vaccine group which gives me the same result in the left hand table which has the intercept included.
However, when I add another category, in this case, age, I now get the last category in the age group as a reference category as shown in the photo below. Is there any way I can parameterise the model so that each estimate in the table is the parameter estimate, rather than a contrast, so that there are no reference categories? I'm presuming it's because the model becomes overparameterized.
What's even more frustrating is that just changing the order of the covariates in the MODEL statement assigns the constraint to a different covariate, as shown below.
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