Generally, the notions of quartiles, quintiles, deciles, and percentiles are referred to as quantiles in general. A quartile divides a distribution in 4 (as in one-fourth), a quintile divides a distribution in 5 (as in one-fifth), and a decile divides a distribution in 10 (as in one-tenth). And of course, a percentile divides a distribution in 100 (one-hundredth). One of the most obvious applications of quantiles in practice is sorting the performance of a group of observations. Such a group could be composed of investment portfolios, students and their grades, or work performance by a firm’s employees.
Some other related topics you might be interested to explore are Mean, Median, Mode, Percent, and Quartile.
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Quartiles, Quintiles, Deciles, and Percentiles are among the topics included in the Quantitative Methods module of the CFA Level 1 Curriculum.
