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Automatic Coding of Dummy Variables
Bruce Ratner, Ph.D.

Qualitative variables, such as gender, marital status, and geographic region, always represent valuable information for the modelling process. However, most modelling techniques cannot directly accept the contextual values (e.g., male or female, married or single) of qualitative variables. Dummy variable coding is the method used to transform qualitative variables into numerical "dummy" variables ready for the modelling process. Manually coding qualitative variables into dummy variables is a tedious task. This technical report provides a SAS-code program that automatically creates dummy variables. The program should be a welcomed entry in the toolkit of data analysts who frequently work with qualitative data. However, for very automatic coding of dummy variables click here.



For more information about this article, call Bruce Ratner at 516.791.3544,
1 800 DM STAT-1, or e-mail at br@dmstat1.com.