Indicator for Top3 and ranking across ros - sas

Question

What I am trying to do are following: I want to find out if a observation (A) is top 3 across others.
For example,
A B C D E F G H TOP3-A
1 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 N
2 80 90 70 80 0 0 0 0 Y
3 70 0 0 80 90 0 0 0 Y
4 60 70 80 90 0 0 0 0 N
I am thinking transpose + rank + transpose + if <4 then Y else N, however it seems too cumbersome and to be honest as a newbie I do not how to code all these steps correctly...

Answer 1

Your method would work, but there's a much simpler way of doing it.
You could use an array, which reads across rows, however I'm using an even easier way of reading across rows.
The OF statement can be used in conjunction with a summary function to calculate values across rather than down. The LARGEST function returns the largest nth value from a range, so you can compare field A to the 3rd largest value in the row.
I've given you the answer to produce Y, N plus an alternative that produces 1, 0 which is even simpler.
data have;
input A B C D E F G H;
datalines;
20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
80 90 70 80 0 0 0 0
70 0 0 80 90 0 0 0
60 70 80 90 0 0 0 0
;
run;
data want;
set have;
if A >= largest(3, of A--H) then top3_A = 'Y'; /* A--H references all columns between A and H */
else top3_A = 'N';
/* or */
top3_A2 = (A >= largest(3, of A--H)); /* returns 1 for true, 0 for flase */
run;