When you choose DIST=LOGNORMAL, the GLIMMIX procedure models the logarithm of the response variable as a normal random variable, The GLIMMIX Procedure | Model options  Because the default link is the identity link, the ILINK option has no effect: the inverse-linked estimates are on the lognormal scale. You have to do the inverse-transformation yourself.  ... View more

This note discusses shrinkage methods available in SAS including LASSO, ridging, and elastic net.  The note provides a link to a paper by Gunes (2015) which discusses LASSO and elastic net and illustrates these methods using PROC GLMSELECT.  In addition, the note shows how LASSO (L1 regularization), ridging (L2 regularization), and elastic net (combination of L1 and L2 regularization) can be directly implemented in PROC NLMIXED which allows you to have direct control over the penalties that these methods add to the likelihood function. Several examples using NLMIXED are provided as well as an example of using LASSO in PROC HPGENSELECT to fit a logistic model.   See this note for quick pointers to procedures implementing any of these methods as well as LAR and many other statistics and methods.  ... View more

Hi Robert,   Since we need a distance measure to feed into the 'proc cluster', 'proc distance (method=dgower)' produces a dissimilarity which is in the same meaning of a distance measure. So this is what we need here.   Yes, there are 11 different methods in finding the hierarchical clustering structure in the data provided by the 'proc cluster'. These methods have different focus on how to find the distance between clusters. 'average linkage' take the distances of each pair of data in 2 clusters as the distance between them. It is a commonly-chosen method and it may also fit your case. The detailed descriptions about these 11 methods, the definitions, focuses, and references, can be found in the SAS document as below. You may want to read it and compare the advantages and disadvantages and choose the best one for your case.   https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/statug/63033/HTML/default/viewer.htm#statug_cluster_sect012.htm   Yingjian ... View more