Which SAS procedure is used for generating descriptive statistics?

The SAS procedure used for generating descriptive statistics is PROC SUMMARY. This procedure calculates various statistical measures, such as means, standard deviations, minimums, maximums, and counts. It is particularly useful when you want to summarize data across different groups by specifying the CLASS statement, which allows for stratification of the results. Additionally, PROC SUMMARY does not produce printed output by default, allowing users to create summaries and then use the results in further analyses or reports, making it a versatile tool for data exploration and analysis.

PROC CONTENTS is primarily designed to provide information about the dataset, including variable names, types, and attributes but does not compute descriptive statistics. PROC FREQ, on the other hand, is specialized for generating frequency counts and distributions for categorical data but does not provide summaries such as means or standard deviations for continuous variables. Finally, PROC TRANSPOSE is used to reshape datasets by transposing data from rows to columns or vice versa and is not focused on generating any form of descriptive statistics.