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math

might be recreational…or it might be something serious

📄️ quantiles

Most things that we observe vary. We don't pay attention to things that don't change. When we measure those variables, we often use statistics like average or median to summarize. But those statistics don't describe the variability of the distribution. Standard deviation works well if the distribution is a bell curve, aka normally distributed. But many things we observe are not normally distributed. Yet we want a concise summary. One way to summarize is using quantiles, which involves dividing our observations into more-or-less equal size buckets of non-overlapping ranges of values. Common examples of quantiles are quartiles, with four buckets, and deciles, with ten buckets.