The frequency variable is used for either standardizing variables or assigning rank scores to the ordinal variables. It has no direct effect on computing the distances.

For standardizing variables and assigning rank scores, PROC DISTANCE treats the data set as if each observation appeared times, where is the value of the FREQ variable for the observation. Nonintegral values of the FREQ variable are truncated to the largest integer less than the FREQ value. If the FREQ variable has a value that is less than 1 or is missing, the observation is not used in the analysis.