Abstract

In this paper, we studied the methods of computing sample quantiles for the case of discrete probability distributions. There are two main methods which are introduced in statistics textbooks. We compared these two methods by simulation from practical and educational necessity. We considered some cases of Poisson, binomial, geometric, negative binomial, and discrete uniform distributions by setting up the parameters, and for each distribution we performed 10,000 times of simulation of drawing random samples of size 20 and 50. At each time of simulation, we computed the difference between the population quantile and the sample quantile obtained by each method. We compared the two methods by using two criteria: one is the mean square error over 10,000 times of simulation, and the other is the frequency of obtaining closer sample quantile to the population quantile than the competing method. We also obtained the estimated probabilities of exact estimation of population quantiles for the two methods, and performed the tests of homogeneity on the probability distribution of under-estimation, exact estimation, and over-estimation of the population quantiles.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call