PARTITION Procedure

TARGET Statement

  • TARGET variable </ LEVEL=NOMINAL | INTERVAL>;

If BY (segment) variables are present, the TARGET statement performs segment-stratified partitioning for each target variable as follows: each nominal target variable is combined with the BY variables for stratification; for each interval target variable, only the BY variables are used for stratification. If BY (segment) variables are not present, the TARGET statement performs stratified partitioning for each nominal target variable and simple random sampling for each interval target variable. If target variables or BY variables have lots of levels, the memory consumption can be huge and an insufficient memory issue might occur. In this case, decreasing the number of threads by using NTHREADS= option in the PROC PARTITION statement might help because memory consumption depends on the number of threads.

You can specify the following option:

LEVEL=NOMINAL | INTERVAL

specifies the level of measurement. You can specify the following values:

NOMINAL

specifies that the level of measurement of the variables is nominal.

INTERVAL

specifies that the level of measurement of the variables is interval.

By default, LEVEL=INTERVAL for numeric variables and LEVEL=NOMINAL for categorical variables.

Last updated: June 22, 2026