PROC SURVEYMEANS issues

ERROR: No valid observations.

and stops processing under the following conditions:

• a DOMAIN statement is specified
• BY-group processing is used
• a variable in the VAR statement has all missing values in a subset of the BY groups
• the QUANTILE= option, the PERCENTILE= option or any of the percentile keywords are specified in the procedure statement

If ODS Graphics is enabled, quantiles are automatically computed for use in the box plot. For this reason, the problem still occurs when ODS Graphics is on and quantiles are not explicitly requested.

BY-group processing is generally inappropriate in survey data analysis. This problem can be avoided if you specify the BY variable in the DOMAIN statement instead and omit the BY statement.

If you do have actual BY groups and if quantiles are not required, the problem can be circumvented by disabling ODS Graphics. Otherwise, each BY group must be processed in a separate execution of PROC SURVEYMEANS.