SAS programming professionals are often asked to receive data files from external sources and analyze them using SAS. Such data files could be received from a different group within one’s own organization, from a client firm, from a Federal agency, or from some other collaborating establishment. Whatever the source, there is likely to be an agreement on the number of variables, variable types, variable lengths, range of values, and variable formats in the incoming data files. Information Technology best practices require that the receiving party perform quality checks (QC’s) on the data to verify that they conform to the agreed-upon standards before the data are used in analysis. 

This paper presents a rigorous methodology for validating user-submitted data sets using Base SAS. Readers can use this methodology and the SAS code examples to set up their own data QC regimen.

Bio:

Michael A. Raithel is a senior systems analyst for…