As a general rule, when you use PROC SORT, specify the variables in the BY statement in the same order that you plan to specify them in the BY statement in the DATA step. For a detailed description of ...

Encoding categorical data is a crucial step in data preprocessing. By converting categorical data into a numeric format, machine learning models can interpret and work more effectively.

If the observations are not in the order that you want, you must either sort the data set or create an index for it before using BY-group processing. If you use the MODIFY statement in BY-group ...