Quintile

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Revision as of 22:06, 25 January 2008 by imported>David E. Volk (typos (data is plural of datum))
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In descriptive statistics, quintile is the value that divide a frequency distribution into five equal parts, each containing approximately a fifth of the sample distribution.

People also use quintile as a division in a sample. For example, the first quintile is the point with one fifth of the data below it after ranking all the data. As one can see here, a quintile will contains approximately 1/5 of the data as the total number of observations is not necessarily divisible by 5.