Percentile - Definition and Overview

This article or section should be merged with quantile

In descriptive statistics, a percentile is any of the 99 values that divide the sorted data into 100 equal parts, so that each part represents 1/100th of the sample or population.

Thus:

• 1st percentile = cuts off lowest 1% of data
• 98th percentile = cuts off lowest 98% of data

Some percentiles have special names:

• The 10th, 20th, ... 90th percentiles are called Deciles.
• The 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles are called Quartiles.
• The 50th percentile is called the Median.

Calculating Percentiles:

See Quantile for methods. The percentile is calculated as the 100-quantile. See also:

• Quantile
• Quartile
• Summary statistics