Calculating Percentile

[Troy12]

Hi,

I am using Percentiles VI that comes with LabVIEW on my input array (see attached). I am however noticing some difference when I do the same percentile calculation using Microsoft Excel. Am I missing anything or doing something wrong in LabVIEW?

Thanks.

[ade77]

You should not be suprised. You should not trust excel, when it comes to precision. I tried the same using MATLAB:

LabVIEW and MATLAB gives the same result. I suspect it is the formula excel uses to calculate the percentile.

But I will go with LabVIEW, especially since it is confirmed with MATLAB.

[Troy12]

Thanks for checking the numbers with Matlab. I will go ahead and use the percentile VIs for statistical computation.

I came across the Wiki page that mentioned about NIST standard that Excel uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile)

[TCPlomp]

Strange is that Open Office gives the same as Excel*

However it is noted that LabVIEW returns 84.95 for the  67th percentile.

The distribution of your data is a litle bit off:

Especially in the end you see large jumps.

Ton

* not so strange, OO wants to mimic excel as good as possible.