The RANK Procedure

BY Statement

Produces a separate set of ranks for each BY group.

Main discussion: BY

Featured in: Ranking Values within BY Groups and Partitioning Observations into Groups Based on Ranks

BY <DESCENDING> variable-1
<...<DESCENDING> variable-n>
<NOTSORTED>;

Required Arguments

variable: specifies the variable that the procedure uses to form BY groups. You can specify more than one variable. If you do not use the NOTSORTED option in the BY statement, the observations in the data set must either be sorted by all the variables that you specify, or they must be indexed appropriately. Variables in a BY statement are called BY variables.

Options

DESCENDING

specifies that the observations are 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 observations are 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 with the same values for the BY variables are not contiguous, the procedure treats each contiguous set as a separate BY group.

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Main discussion:	BY
Featured in:	Ranking Values within BY Groups and Partitioning Observations into Groups Based on Ranks