TIMEPLOT Procedure

BY Statement

Produces a separate plot for each BY group.

See:

variable: specifies the variable that the procedure uses to form BY groups. You can specify more than one variable. Unless you use the NOTSORTED option in the BY statement, the data must either be sorted by variables or indexed. These variables are called BY variables.

DESCENDING: specifies that the data set is sorted in descending order by the variable that immediately follows the word DESCENDING in the BY statement.

NOTSORTED: specifies that observations are not necessarily sorted in alphabetic or numeric order. The data is grouped in another way (for example, chronological order).

The requirement for ordering or indexing observations according to the values of BY variables is suspended for BY-group processing when you use the NOTSORTED option. In fact, the procedure does not use an index if you specify NOTSORTED. The procedure defines a BY group as a set of contiguous observations that have the same values for all BY variables. If observations that have the same values for the BY variables are not contiguous, then the procedure treats each contiguous set as a separate BY group.