The WEIGHT statement identifies a variable in the input data set to be used as the exponential family dispersion parameter weight for each observation. The exponential family dispersion parameter is divided by the WEIGHT variable value for each observation. This is true regardless of whether the parameter is estimated by the procedure or specified in the MODEL statement with the SCALE= option. It is also true for distributions such as the Poisson and binomial that are not usually defined to have a dispersion parameter. For these distributions, a WEIGHT variable weights the overdispersion parameter, which has the default value of 1.

The WEIGHT variable does not have to be an integer; if it is less than or equal to 0 or if it is missing, the corresponding observation is not used.