OUT= Data Set

The CAPABILITY procedure creates an OUT= data set for each OUTPUT statement. The new data set contains an observation for each combination of levels of the variables in the BY statement, or a single observation if you do not specify a BY statement. Thus, the number of observations in the new data set corresponds to the number of groups for which statistics are calculated. The variables in the new data set are as follows:

• variables in the BY statement. The values of these variables match the values in the corresponding BY group in the DATA= data set.

• variables in the ID statement. The values of these variables match those for the first observation in each BY group, or for the first observation in the data set if you do not specify a BY statement.

• variables created by selecting statistics in the OUTPUT statement. The values of the statistics are computed using all the nonmissing data, or statistics are computed for each BY group if you use a BY statement.

• variables created by requesting new percentiles with the PCTLPTS= option. The names of these new variables depend on the values of the PCTLPRE= and PCTLNAME= options.

If the output data set contains a percentile variable or a quartile variable, the percentile definition assigned with the PCTLDEF= option in the PROC CAPABILITY statement is recorded on the output data set label.

The values of variables requested with the statistics keywords CP, CPK, CPL, CPM, CPU, K, PCTGTR, and PCTLSS are missing unless you identify specification limits in a SPEC statement or in a SPEC= data set.

As an alternative to OUT= data sets, you can create an OUTTABLE= data set. The structure of the OUTTABLE= data set may be more appropriate when you are computing summary statistics and capability indices for multiple process variables. See OUTTABLE= Data Set.