Finding the percentile of a value given other percentiles

2.7k Views Asked by At

I am using someone else's research and only have part of the data. I want to find the percentile of a value, such as 350.2, based upon the data given.

The following is known:

mean = 308.2

The following percentiles are known:

5%: -27.4
25%: 3.2
50%: 56.3
75%: 260.4
90%: 736.0
95%: 1364.8

I assume you would want to calculate, the std deviation, and then from there you can calculate the given percentile for a value is that correct?

This data looks a little weird to me, as you would assume the difference between the 50th and 25th to be the same as the difference between the 75th and 50th.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

Your final observation about the $25$th, $50$th, and $75$th percentiles just says the distribution is not symmetric. Do you have a reason to believe that it should be? Using the standard deviation assumes the distribution is Gaussian, which the evidence contradicts. All you really know is that $350.2$ is somewhere between the $75$th and $90$th percentile. If the events between $260.4$ and $736.0$ are equally distributed, you would have $350.2$ at the $\frac {350.2-260.4}{736.0-260.4}\cdot 15+75\approx 78$th percentile. It is probably rather higher than that-if the data is mostly near the middle it will be. It is hard to give a nice justifiable answer.