If the data are coordinates, observations with missing values are excluded from the analysis.

If the data are distances, missing values are treated as infinite. The neighbors of each observation are determined solely by the distances in that observation. The distances are not required to be symmetric, and there is no check for symmetry; the neighbors of each observation are determined only from the distances in that observation. This treatment of missing values is quite different from that of the CLUSTER procedure, which ignores the upper triangle of the distance matrix.