Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them

Chapter 9: Data Cleaning Tasks

Introduction

Task: Looking for possible data errors using a given range

Task: Demonstrating a macro to report on outliers using fixed ranges

Task: Demonstrating a macro that performs automatic outlier detection

How the macro works

Conclusion

Introduction

One of the first tasks facing a data analyst is to check for possible invalid numeric values. For some variables, you can decide if a value might be an error if it is outside a given range. For example, a value for resting heart rate would be unusual if it were below 40 or above 100.

Another approach for identifying possible numeric outliers is to see if a given data value does not seem to “belong” with the other values. A common approach is to compute a mean ...