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There are a variety of tutorials available for handling missing values in SAS. These tutorials typically cover techniques for identifying and handling missing values, such as using PROC FREQ and PROC MEANS, as well as imputation methods like mean substitution and multiple imputation. Additionally, there are tutorials that focus on specific scenarios, such as dealing with missing data in time series or categorical data. These tutorials often provide step-by-step instructions and examples to help users effectively manage and analyze data with missing values in SAS. They are a valuable resource for individuals looking to improve their data analysis skills and ensure accurate results in their projects.
Missing Values
SAS stores missing values differently depending on the variable type.
- Character variables: Missing values for character variables appear as blanks.
- Numeric variables: Missing values for numeric variables (including date variables) appear as a period.

It is important to understand how SAS handles missing values when you execute statements. Depending on the statements being used, SAS might handle missing values in different ways. For example, it might treat a missing value as the lowest possible value (e.g., frequency tables in PROC FREQ), or it might omit the value from the computation (e.g., regression).
Internally, SAS treats numeric missing values as an extremely small or an extremely large number. Most of the time, the user will probably not be affected by this. In general, if you are subsetting data or doing any kind of conditional logic based on continuous numeric values, you should always explicitly tell SAS how to handle missing values first.
Your SAS help manual will help you understand how missing values are treated in the statements you are executing.
SAS automatically detects blank cells in external data files as missing values. You do not need to enter a period character in blank cells.
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Cite this article
stats writer (2024). What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/stats/what-are-some-tutorials-for-dealing-with-missing-values-in-sas/
stats writer. "What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 24 Jun. 2024, https://scales.arabpsychology.com/stats/what-are-some-tutorials-for-dealing-with-missing-values-in-sas/.
stats writer. "What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 2024. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/stats/what-are-some-tutorials-for-dealing-with-missing-values-in-sas/.
stats writer (2024) 'What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?', PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Available at: https://scales.arabpsychology.com/stats/what-are-some-tutorials-for-dealing-with-missing-values-in-sas/.
[1] stats writer, "What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?," PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, vol. X, no. Y, ص Z-Z, June, 2024.
stats writer. What are some tutorials for dealing with missing values in SAS?. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. 2024;vol(issue):pages.
