Statistics Notes: Quartiles, quintiles, centiles, and other quantiles

Abstract

When presenting or analysing measurements of a continuous variable it is sometimes helpful to group subjects into several equal groups. For example, to create four equal groups we need the values that split the data such that 25% of the observations are in each group. The cut off points are called quartiles, and there are three of them (the middle one also being called the median). Likewise, we use two tertiles to split data into three groups, four quintiles to split them into five groups, and so on. The general term for such cut off points is quantiles; other values likely to be encountered are deciles, which split data into 10 parts, and centiles, which split the data into 100 parts (also called percentiles). Values such as quartiles can also be …