The TABLES statement instructs PROC CORRESP to create a contingency table, Burt table, or binary table from the values of two or more categorical variables. The TABLES statement specifies classification variables that are used to construct the rows and columns of the contingency table. The variables can be either numeric or character. The variable lists in the TABLES statement and the CROSS= option together determine the row and column labels of the contingency table.

You can specify both row variables and column variables separated by a comma, or you can specify only column variables and no comma. If you do not specify row variables (that is, if you list variables but do not use the comma as a delimiter), then you should specify either the MCA or the BINARY option. With the MCA option, PROC CORRESP creates a Burt table, which is a crosstabulation of each variable with itself and every other variable. The Burt table is symmetric. With the BINARY option, PROC CORRESP creates a binary table, which consists of one row for each input data set observation and one column for each category of each TABLES statement variable. If the binary matrix is , then the Burt table is . Specifying the BINARY option with the NOROWS option produces the same results as specifying the MCA option (except for the chi-square statistics).

See Figure 30.6 for an example or see the section The MCA Option for a detailed description of Burt tables.

You can use the WEIGHT statement with the TABLES statement to read category frequencies. Specify the SUPPLEMENTARY statement to name variables with categories that are supplementary rows or columns. You cannot specify the ID or VAR statement with the TABLES statement. See the section Using the TABLES Statement for an example.