PROC CORR excludes observations with missing values in the WEIGHT and FREQ variables. By default, PROC CORR uses pairwise deletion when observations contain missing values. PROC CORR includes all nonmissing pairs of values for each pair of variables in the statistical computations. Therefore, the correlation statistics might be based on different numbers of observations.

If you specify the NOMISS option, PROC CORR uses listwise deletion when a value of the VAR or WITH statement variable is missing. PROC CORR excludes all observations with missing values from the analysis. Therefore, the number of observations for each pair of variables is identical.

The PARTIAL statement always excludes the observations with missing values by automatically invoking the NOMISS option. With the NOMISS option, the data are processed more efficiently because fewer resources are needed. Also, the resulting correlation matrix is nonnegative definite.

In contrast, if the data set contains missing values for the analysis variables and the NOMISS option is not specified, the resulting correlation matrix might not be nonnegative definite. This leads to several statistical difficulties if you use the correlations as input to regression or other statistical procedures.