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Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Statistics for Analysis

Percentile

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

/pərˈsentaɪl/nounCommon term

In data science & analytics, percentile means: The value below which a given percentage of observations fall; for example, the 90th percentile of load time is the time within which 90% of page loads finish.

In Turkish: yüzdelik, yüzdelik dilim

How it is used

Often written as p50, p90 or p99, especially for response times. The 50th percentile is the median, and the 25th and 75th are the quartiles. People also say a customer is 'in the top 10th percentile', though 'in the top 10%' is clearer.

Example sentences

  1. The 95th percentile of page load time is 1.8 seconds, while the median is 0.6.

  2. Customers above the 90th percentile of spending get a personal account manager.

Common collocations

  • 90th percentile
  • percentile rank
  • top percentile
  • calculate percentiles
  • medianThe middle value when all the numbers in a group are sorted from smallest to largest; half the values are below it and half are above it.
  • distributionThe way the values of a variable are spread out, showing which values are common, which are rare and how far apart they are; often viewed as a histogram.
  • outlierA value that is very far from most of the other values in a dataset, for example one order of 50,000 dollars among orders of around 40 dollars.
  • summary statisticsA small set of numbers that describe a dataset at a glance, such as the count, mean, median, minimum, maximum and standard deviation of each column.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Statistics for Analysis

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