The QUANTREG Procedure

This example uses the data set from a university union survey of salaries of professors in 1991. The survey covered departments in US colleges and universities that list programs in statistics. The goal of this example is to examine the relationship between faculty salaries and years of service.

The data include salaries and years of service for 459 professors. The scatter plot in Output 81.5.1 shows that the relationship is not linear and that a quadratic or cubic regression curve is appropriate. Output 81.5.1 shows a cubic curve.

The curve in Output 81.5.1 does not adequately describe the conditional salary distributions and how they change with length of service. Output 81.5.2 shows the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for each number of years, which gives a better picture of the conditional distributions.

data salary;
   input Salaries Years @@;
   label Salaries='Salaries (1000s of dollars)';
   datalines;
54.94   2  58.24   2  58.11   2  52.23   2  52.98    2  57.62    2
44.48   2  57.22   2  54.24   2  54.79   2  56.42    2  61.90    2
63.90   2  64.10   2  47.77   2  54.86   2  49.31    2  53.37    2
51.69   2  53.66   2  58.77   2  56.77   2  53.06    2  54.86    2
50.96   2  56.46   2  51.67   2  49.37   2  56.86    2  49.85    2

   ... more lines ...   

85.72  25  64.87  25  51.76  25  51.11  25  51.31   25  78.28   25
57.91  25  86.78  25  58.27  25  56.56  25  76.33   25  61.83   25
69.13  25  63.15  25  66.13  25
;

These descriptive percentiles do not clearly show trends with length of service. The following statements use polynomial quantile regression to obtain a smooth version.

ods graphics on;

proc quantreg data=salary ci=sparsity;
   model salaries = years years*years years*years*years
                     /quantile=0.25 0.5 0.75
                     plot=fitplot(showlimits);

   test  years/QINTERACT;

run;

The results are shown in Output 81.5.3 and Output 81.5.5. Output 81.5.3 displays the regression coefficients for the three quantiles, from which you can see a difference among the estimated parameters of the variable years across the three quantiles. To test whether the difference is significant, you can specify the option QINTERACT in the TEST statement. Output 81.5.4 indicates that the difference is not significant (the p-value is greater than 0.05).

The three fitted quantile curves and their 95% confidence limits in the Output 81.5.5 clearly show that salary dispersion increases gradually with length of service. After 15 years, a salary more than $70,000 is relatively high, whereas a salary less than $60,000 is relatively low. Percentile curves of this type are useful in medical science as reference curves (Yu, Lu, and Stabder, 2003).