What’s New in the Base SAS Statistical Procedures

Overview

There are several enhancements to the Base SAS procedures for SAS 9.3. The behavior of the FREQ procedure has changed from SAS 9.2 to SAS 9.3.

Enhancements

CORR Procedure

The POLYSERIAL option has been added to the PROC CORR statement. The POLYSERIAL option requests a table of polyserial correlation coefficients. Polyserial correlation measures the correlation between two continuous variables with a bivariate normal distribution, where only one variable is observed directly. Information about the unobserved variable is obtained through an observed ordinal variable that is derived from the unobserved variable by classifying its values into a finite set of discrete, ordered values.

FREQ Procedure

The FREQ procedure now produces agreement plots when the AGREE option is specified and ODS Graphics is enabled. It also provides exact unconditional confidence limits for the relative risk and the risk difference.

UNIVARIATE Procedure

The UNIVARIATE procedure supports five new fitted distributions for SAS 9.3:

Gumbel distribution
inverse Gaussian distribution
generalized Pareto distribution
power function distribution
Rayleigh distribution

These new distributions are available in the CDFPLOT, HISTOGRAM, PROBPLOT, PPPLOT, and QQPLOT statements.

Changes in Software Behavior from SAS 9.2 to SAS 9.3

In the FREQ procedure, frequency plots and cumulative frequency plots are no longer produced by default when ODS Graphics is enabled. You can request these plots with the PLOTS=FREQPLOT and PLOTS=CUMFREQPLOT options in the TABLES statement.