CARDINALITY Procedure
Overview: CARDINALITY Procedure
The CARDINALITY procedure determines a variable’s cardinality or limited cardinality in SAS Viya Workbench. The cardinality of a variable is the number of its distinct values, and the limited cardinality of a variable is the number of its distinct values that do not exceed a specified threshold.
In order to decide whether to include a variable in a subsequent SAS analysis as a classification or interval variable, it is sufficient to compute only the limited cardinality (and not the full cardinality) because both tend to yield the same decision. The limited cardinality is computationally less expensive than the full cardinality, especially for big data.
The CARDINALITY procedure creates the following:
a cardinality data table, which contains summary information for each variable and some additional statistics about numeric variables
a details data table, which contains the levels of each variable