The WEIGHT statement specifies weights for each observation and indicates supplementary observations for simple correspondence analyses with VAR statement input. You can include only one WEIGHT statement, and the weight variable must be numeric.

If you omit the WEIGHT statement, each observation contributes a value of 1 to the frequency count for its category. That is, each observation represents one subject. When you specify a WEIGHT statement, each observation contributes the value of the weighting variable for that observation. For example, a weight of 3 means that the observation represents three subjects. Weight values are not required to be integers.

You can specify the WEIGHT statement with a TABLES statement to indicate category frequencies, as in the following example:

proc freq;
   tables a*b / out=outfreq sparse;
run;

proc corresp freqout;
   tables a, b;
   weight count;
run;

If you specify a VAR statement, you can specify the WEIGHT statement to indicate supplementary observations and to weight some rows of the table more heavily than others. When the value of the WEIGHT variable is negative, the observation is treated as supplementary, and the absolute value of the weight is used as the weighting value.

You cannot specify a WEIGHT statement with a VAR statement and the MCA option, because the table must be symmetric. Supplementary variables are indicated with the SUPPLEMENTARY statement, so differential weighting of rows is inappropriate.