This week our SAS paper review looks at “Deciphering PROC COMPARE Codes: The Use of the bAND Function  ” by Joseph Hinson and Margaret Coughlin of  Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp.

PROC COMPARE is often seen as the gold standard for validating datasets within clinical trials. However the output it produces can often be extensive and manually interpreting this can be timely and error prone. This paper discusses an automated approach for examining the results of PROC COMPARE, by interpreting the return code that the procedure creates. This approach allows the user to quickly create single page summaries displaying the comparison results of multiple (i.e. more than 30) comparisons in an easy to interpret one observation per comparison format.

We have previously seen several papers that have explained how to utilise PROC COMPARE return codes, however what differentiates this paper is its clever use of the SAS bAND function to interpret the return codes.

The paper was presented at the SAS  Global Forum, 2012. Download the paper here.