BETA Function

Returns the value of the beta function.

Category:

Mathematical

Syntax

BETA(a,b)

is the first shape parameter, where a>0.

is the second shape parameter, where b>0.

The BETA function is mathematically given by the equation

\begin{matrix} β (a, b) = \int_{0}^{1} x \begin{matrix} a - 1 \end{matrix} (1 - x) \begin{matrix} b - 1 \end{matrix} d x \end{matrix}

with a>0, b>0. It should be noted that

\begin{matrix} β (a, b) = \frac{Γ (a) Γ (b)}{Γ (a + b)} \end{matrix}

where

Γ (.)

is the gamma function.

If the expression cannot be computed, BETA returns a missing value.

The following SAS statement produces this result.

SAS Statement	Result
x=beta(5,3);	0.9523809524e-2