Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Programming Certification Practice Exam

Which SAS procedure is used to find distinct values of variables to clean your data?

1. PROC CONTENTS

2. PROC MEANS

3. PROC FREQ

4. PROC PRINT

The correct answer is: PROC FREQ

The choice that addresses the finding of distinct values of variables for data cleaning is PROC FREQ. This procedure generates frequency tables that display the number of occurrences of each unique value in a dataset. When you run PROC FREQ on a variable, you can easily identify distinct values and their respective counts, which is critical for detecting duplicates or erroneous entries in your data. This insight is particularly valuable in the data cleaning stage, allowing analysts to make informed decisions about how to address any inconsistencies or inaccuracies present in the dataset. By examining these frequencies, users can quickly spot values that might need to be cleaned, recoded, or further investigated. While other procedures have important roles, they do not serve the primary purpose of identifying distinct values. For instance, PROC CONTENTS provides metadata about the dataset's structure without detailing distinct values, PROC MEANS summarizes numerical data typically associated with statistics such as sums and averages, and PROC PRINT displays the contents of a dataset directly without any analytical frequency information.