In
descriptive statistics
A descriptive statistic (in the count noun sense) is a summary statistic that quantitatively describes or summarizes features from a collection of information, while descriptive statistics (in the mass noun sense) is the process of using and an ...
, a decile is any of the nine values that divide the sorted data into ten equal parts, so that each part represents 1/10 of the sample or population. A decile is one possible form of a
quantile
In statistics and probability, quantiles are cut points dividing the range of a probability distribution into continuous intervals with equal probabilities or dividing the observations in a sample in the same way. There is one fewer quantile t ...
; others include the
quartile
In statistics, quartiles are a type of quantiles which divide the number of data points into four parts, or ''quarters'', of more-or-less equal size. The data must be ordered from smallest to largest to compute quartiles; as such, quartiles are ...
and
percentile
In statistics, a ''k''-th percentile, also known as percentile score or centile, is a score (e.g., a data point) a given percentage ''k'' of all scores in its frequency distribution exists ("exclusive" definition) or a score a given percentage ...
.
[.] A decile rank arranges the data in order from lowest to highest and is done on a scale of one to ten where each successive number corresponds to an increase of 10 percentage points.
Special usage: The decile mean
A moderately robust measure of
central tendency
In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution.Weisberg H.F (1992) ''Central Tendency and Variability'', Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in ...
- known as the decile mean - can be computed by making use of a sample's deciles
to
(
= 10th percentile,
= 20th percentile and so on). It is calculated as follows:
:
Apart from serving as an alternative for the
mean
A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...
and the
truncated mean, it also forms the basis for robust measures of
skewness
In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean. The skewness value can be positive, zero, negative, or undefined.
For a unimodal ...
and
kurtosis
In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis (from , ''kyrtos'' or ''kurtos'', meaning "curved, arching") refers to the degree of “tailedness” in the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable. Similar to skewness, kurtos ...
, and even a
normality test.
See also
*
Summary statistics
*
Socio-economic decile (for New Zealand schools)
References
Summary statistics
{{statistics-stub
de:Quantil#Dezil
ru:Квантиль#Дециль