specifies the sort order for the levels of the classification variables (which are specified in the CLASS
statement).
This ordering determines which parameters in the model correspond to each level in the data, so the ORDER= option may be useful
when you use ESTIMATE
statement. This option applies to the levels for all classification variables, except when you use the (default) ORDER=FORMATTED
option with numeric classification variables that have no explicit format. In that case, the levels of such variables are
ordered by their internal value.
The ORDER= option can take the following values:
Value of ORDER=
|
Levels Sorted By
|
DATA
|
Order of appearance in the input data set
|
FORMATTED
|
External formatted value, except for numeric variables with no explicit format, which are sorted by their unformatted (internal)
value
|
FREQ
|
Descending frequency count; levels with the most observations come first in the order
|
INTERNAL
|
Unformatted value
|
By default, ORDER=FORMATTED. For ORDER=FORMATTED and ORDER=INTERNAL, the sort order is machine-dependent.
For more information about sort order, see the chapter on the SORT procedure in the
Base SAS Procedures Guide and the discussion of BY-group processing in
SAS Language Reference: Concepts.