L03 Comparisons: Part II Sorting, Ranking and Percentiles

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Lecture 3: Comparisons Part II: Sorting, Ranking, Percentiles.

1. Open Office Presentation, slides + audio

2. PPT presentation, with audio embedded, [56m] [49 MB]

3. Transcript = Writeup of audio files associated with each slide

4. Lecture: ISM03.doc -- textbook writeup of lecture materials

5. EXCEL Lab provides practice on lecture concepts: ISM03Lab.docx + Data in ISM03.xslx

6. QUIZ: test concepts from lecture + lab, Q03.docx

7. Supplementary Reading: Confusions about Percentiles.

To view this lecture online or download lecture Video File please visit this link.

Lecture and Powerpoint Slides are attached. Exercises need to be made up.

EXCEL file with data on GNP per capita and other relevant material is also attached below.

New functions have been introduced in EXCEL 2010. These are explained here. The PERCENTRANK is the same as PERCENTILERANK.INC, which maps the smallest number in list to 0%, the largest to 100%, and the ranks in the middle linearly, so 1,2,3,4 go to 0/3, 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3. There are three arguments to the function, the third argument is significance, which defaults to 2. You can increase (or decrease it) if you like. If default is used, then 1/3 comes out to 33.300%, which is baffling since it differs from the expected value of 33.333%

For a list of n objects, the PERCENTILERANK.EXC function maps the rank 0 (which is not part of the dataset) to 0%, and the rank n+1 to 1, so the numbers 1,2,3,4 end up at 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, and 4/5.