SAS Interview Questions And Answers prepared from Codingcompiler experts. These SAS interview questions were asked in various interviews conducted by top multinational companies across the globe. We hope that these interview questions on SAS Development will help you in cracking your next SAS job interview. All the best and happy learning.
SAS Interview Questions
SAS Interview Questions And Answers
Frequently Asked SAS Interview Questions and Answers
SAS Interview Questions
1. What is SAS?
2. What is the one statement to set the criteria of data that can be coded in any step?
3. What are the features of SAS?
4. How would you include common or reuse code to be processed along with your statements?
5. Which are the statements whose placement in the DATA step is critical.
6. What is the function of output statement in a SAS Program?
7. What is the difference between using drop = data set option in data statement and set statement?
8. Name a few functions that SAS is capable of performing.
9. How many types of data are there in SAS?
10. What is a ‘Data Step’?
SAS Interview Questions And Answers
1. What is SAS?
Answer: SAS (Statistical Analytics System)
- SAS – SAS Interview Questions – Edureka
- SAS is a software suite for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management and predictive analytics
- It is developed by SAS Institute.
- SAS provides a graphical point-and-click user interface for non-technical users and more advanced options through the SAS language.
2. What is the one statement to set the criteria of data that can be coded in any step?
Answer: WHERE statement can sets the criteria for any data set in a data step or a proc step.
3. What are the features of SAS?
Answer: The following are the features of SAS:
- Business Solutions: SAS provides business analysis that can be used as business products for various companies to use.
- Analytics: SAS is the market leader in the analytics of various business products and services.
- Data Access & Management: SAS can also be use as a DBMS software.
- Reporting & Graphics: Hello SAS helps to visualize the analysis in the form of summary, lists and graphic reports.
- Visualization: We can visualize the reports in the form of graphs ranging from simple scatter plots and bar charts to complex multi-page classification panels.
4. How would you include common or reuse code to be processed along with your statements?
Answer:
– Using SAS Macros.
– Using a %include statement
5. Which are the statements whose placement in the DATA step is critical.
Answer: DATA, INPUT, RUN, CARDS ,INFILE,WHERE,LABEL,SELECT,INFORMAT,FORMAT
6. What is the function of output statement in a SAS Program?
Answer: You can use the OUTPUT statement to save summary statistics in a SAS data set. This information can then be used to create customized reports or to save historical information about a process.
You can use options in the OUTPUT statement to
- Specify the statistics to save in the output data set,
- Specify the name of the output data set, and
- Compute and save percentiles not automatically computed by the CAPABILITY procedure.
7. What is the difference between using drop = data set option in data statement and set statement?
Answer: If you don’t want to process certain variables and you do not want them to appear in the new data set, then specify drop = data set option in the set statement.
Whereas If want to process certain variables and do not want them to appear in the new data set, then specify drop = data set option in the data statement.
8. Name a few functions that SAS is capable of performing.
Answer: Data management and storage; app development; improvement of quality. There are honestly quite a few functions that SAS performs – however, these are some of the main ones.
9. How many types of data are there in SAS?
Answer: You could say that this is one of the easier SAS interview questions – there are only two data types in SAS. The two types are called Character data and Numeric data.
10. What is a ‘Data Step’?
Answer: The “Data Step” is responsible for the creation of datasets. These sets are comprised of data and what is known as data dictionaries – lists that hold various information about the data within them.
SAS Interview Questions And Answers
11. What’s the difference between a ‘function’ and a ‘procedure’?
Answer: This might be one of the more tricky SAS interview questions to pinpoint – it’s quite easy to get mixed up between the two.
A function in SAS requires specific argument values to successfully perform an observation. This is not the case with procedures, however. They only require one single variable to be able to perform the before mentioned observation.
It is more than likely that you’ll get quite a few comparison questions during your job interview. Some of these questions can be tricky – not necessarily because they’re difficult in of themselves, but because the two objects that you’re comparing might be very similar. In such a situation, it can be tricky to draw a clear distinction – that’s why extensive studying beforehand is so important!
12. How to change sorting from ‘ascending’ to ‘descending’?
Answer: As can you might’ve noticed there are a lot of comparisons in SAS interview questions. Quite frankly, all you need to do to achieve this is to input the DESCENDING command into your code (or, rather, swap it with the ASCENDING command).
13. Do SAS ‘informats’ have any other functions?
Answer: Apart from telling SAS on how to read data into variables, ‘informats’ input data from external files known as Flat Files ASCII.
14. What are the most common programming errors committed in SAS?
Answer: Most commonly committed programming errors in SAS are:
- Not using debugging techniques
- Not checking the log after submitting program
- Not using Fsview option vigorously
- Missing semicolon
15. What is the difference between reading data from an external file and reading data from an existing data set?
Answer: The main difference is that while reading an existing data set with the SET statement, SAS retains the values of the variables from one observation to the next. Whereas when reading the data from an external file, only the observations are read. The variables will have to re-declared if they need to be used.
16. Do you know how to create a permanent data set?
Answer: Two crucial steps:
- Assign a library and engine.
- Create the data. Assign a library and a data set name to make the data set permanent.
17. Why and when do you use Proc SQl?
Answer: Proc SQL is very convenient for performing table joins compared to a data step merge as it does not require the key columns to be sorted prior to join. A data step is more suitable for sequential observation-by-observation processing.
PROC SQL can save a great deal of time if u want to filter the variables while selecting or we can modify them, apply format and creating new variables, macro variables…as well as subsetting the data. PROC SQL offers great flexibility for joining tables.
18. Give an example where SAS fails to convert character value to numeric value automatically?
Answer: Suppose value of a variable PayRate begins with a dollar sign ($). When SAS tries to automatically convert the values of PayRate to numeric values, the dollar sign blocks the process. The values cannot be converted to numeric values.
19. Describe the ways in which you can create macro variables?
Answer: There are the 5 ways to create macro variables:%Let
- %Global
- Call Symput
- Proc SQl into clause
- Macro Parameters.
20. What is the length assigned to the target variable by the scan function?
Answer: 200
Frequently Asked SAS Interview Questions and Answers
21. Name few SAS functions?
Answer: Scan, Substr, trim, Catx, Index, tranwrd, find, Sum.
22. What is the work of tranwrd function?
Answer: TRANWRD function replaces or removes all occurrences of a pattern of characters within a character string.
23. What does P-value signify about the statistical data?
Answer:
- P-value is used to determine the significance of results after a hypothesis test in statistics.
- P-value helps the readers to draw conclusions and is always between 0 and 1.
- P- Value > 0.05 denotes weak evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
- P-value <= 0.05 denotes strong evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis can be rejected.
- P-value=0.05is the marginal value indicating it is possible to go either way.
24. Name a couple of aspects that define the SAS syntax.
Answer: This is one of the SAS interview questions where you do have some freedom to choose from a few options. To give you an example, you could mention that variable names in SAS are set and described by using the INPUT statement. Additionally, all of the statements in SAS are ended with a “;“.
25. What is the main difference between ‘format’ and ‘informat’?
Answer: Format and Informat have a couple of differences, but when it comes to the fundamental level, there is one key aspect to note: Format is used to write files, while Informat is used to read them.
Top Best SAS interview Questions
26. What’s the difference between ‘NODUP’ and ‘NODUPKEY’?
Answer: NODUP is responsible for eliminating identical observations, while NODUPKEY deletes BY variables.
27. Give a few examples of places where ‘table lookups’ may be stored.
Answer: There are several places where you could store your table lookups. One of the more popular of these places would be the code. Additionally, datasets and arrays also store table lookups.
28. Can a numeric variable belong to the ‘character’ data type?
Answer:
Yes, yes it can. This depends on the context and the situation that a number is used in.
The main requirement for a numeric valuable to belong to the character data type is that the number mustn’t represent several items, but rather a position on some sort of a scale.
To give you an example, in a situation where the variable “Dog” has 0 and 1 values attached to it, these do not represent the number of dogs. Rather, 0 means that “it is a dog”, while 1 means “it is not a dog”.
29. How to create list output for cross-tabulations in proc freq?
Answer: To generate list output for cross-tabulations, add a slash (/) and the LIST option to the TABLES statement in your PROC FREQ step.
TABLES variable-1*variable-2 < * … variable-n> / LIST;
30. What is the difference between do while and do until?
Answer: An important difference between the DO UNTIL and DO WHILE statements is that the DO WHILE expression is evaluated at the top of the DO loop. If the expression is false the first time it is evaluated, then the DO loop never executes. Whereas DO UNTIL executes at least once.
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