The QUANTSELECT Procedure (Experimental)

Quantile regression, which was introduced by Koenker and Bassett (1978), is a modern method that models the effects of covariates on the conditional quantiles of a response variable. The QUANTSELECT procedure performs effect selection in the framework of quantile regression. A variety of effect selection methods are available, including greedy methods and penalty methods. The QUANTSELECT procedure offers extensive capabilities for customizing the effect selection processes with a variety of candidate selecting, effect-selection stopping, and final-model choosing criteria. PROC QUANTSELECT also provides graphical summaries for the effect selection processes.

The QUANTSELECT procedure compares most closely to the GLMSELECT and QUANTREG procedures. PROC GLMSELECT performs effect selection in the framework of general linear models. PROC QUANTREG supports a variety of estimation and inference methods for quantile regression but does not directly provide effect selection facilities. The QUANTSELECT procedure, as a counterpart of PROC GLMSELECT for quantile regression, fills this gap.

The QUANTSELECT procedure focuses on linear quantile models for univariate responses and offers great flexibility for and insight into the effect selection algorithm. The QUANTSELECT procedure inherits most of its syntax from PROC GLMSELECT and PROC QUANTREG. The QUANTSELECT procedure provides results that are similar to those of PROC GLMSELECT and PROC QUANTREG. These results (displayed tables, output data sets, and macro variables) make it easy to explore the selected models in PROC QUANTREG.