The UNIVARIATE procedure provides a variety of descriptive measures, graphical displays, and statistical methods, which you can use to summarize, visualize, analyze, and model the statistical distributions of numeric variables. These tools are appropriate for a broad range of tasks and applications:

• Exploring the distributions of the variables in a data set is an important preliminary step in data analysis, data warehousing, and data mining. With the UNIVARIATE procedure you can use tables and graphical displays, such as histograms and nonparametric density estimates, to find key features of distributions, identify outliers and extreme observations, determine the need for data transformations, and compare distributions.

• Modeling the distributions of data and validating distributional assumptions are basic steps in statistical analysis. You can use the UNIVARIATE procedure to fit parametric distributions (beta, exponential, gamma, lognormal, normal, Johnson , Johnson , and Weibull) and to compute probabilities and percentiles from these models. You can assess goodness of fit with hypothesis tests and with graphical displays such as probability plots and quantile-quantile plots. You can also use the UNIVARIATE procedure to validate distributional assumptions for other types of statistical analysis. When standard assumptions are not met, you can use the UNIVARIATE procedure to perform nonparametric tests and compute robust estimates of location and scale.

• Summarizing the distribution of the data is often helpful for creating effective statistical reports and presentations. You can use the UNIVARIATE procedure to create tables of summary measures, such as means and percentiles, together with graphical displays, such as histograms and comparative histograms, which facilitate the interpretation of the report.

The following examples illustrate a few of the tasks that you can carry out with the UNIVARIATE procedure.