How can you conduct hypothesis testing in SAS?

Hypothesis testing in SAS is effectively conducted using procedures specifically designed for statistical analyses, such as PROC TTEST and PROC ANOVA. These procedures allow you to perform hypothesis tests concerning means or variances, which are fundamental in statistics.

PROC TTEST is used to compare the means of two groups to determine if they are statistically different from each other, thus testing the null hypothesis that the two groups have the same mean. Similarly, PROC ANOVA is utilized to analyze the differences among group means in a sample, enabling users to conduct tests for more than two groups simultaneously. Both procedures output relevant statistics, including p-values and confidence intervals, which help in making decisions about the hypotheses.

On the other hand, while creating custom functions and formulas can be useful for specific scenarios, they are not the direct approach to conducting formal hypothesis testing in SAS. Running descriptive statistics alone provides a summary of the data but does not involve testing a hypothesis about population parameters. Using PROC SORT to rearrange data is a data preparation step that does not carry out hypothesis testing. Therefore, the use of dedicated statistical procedures is the correct method for conducting hypothesis tests in SAS.