Percentile for Each Observation w/r/t Grouping Variable

Question

I have some data that looks like the following. It is grouped by variable \"Year\" and I want to extract the percentiles of each observation of Score, with respect to t

Answer 1

I may be misunderstanding, but I think it can be done this way:

> years = c(2006, 2006, 2006, 2006, 2001, 2001, 2001, 2001, 2001)
> scores = c(13, 65, 23, 34, 78, 56, 89, 98, 100)
> tapply(scores, years, quantile)
$`2001`
  0%  25%  50%  75% 100% 
  56   78   89   98  100 

$`2006`
   0%   25%   50%   75%  100% 
13.00 20.50 28.50 41.75 65.00 

Is this right?

I mean the actual percentile of each observation. – Ryan Rosario

Edit:

I think this may do it then:

> tapply(scores, years, function(x) { f = ecdf(x); sapply(x, f) })
$`2001`
[1] 0.4 0.2 0.6 0.8 1.0

$`2006`
[1] 0.25 1.00 0.50 0.75

With your data:

> tapply(scores, years, function(x) { f = ecdf(x); sapply(x, f) })
$`2000`
[1] 0.3333333 0.6666667 1.0000000

$`2008`
[1] 0.5 1.0

Edit 2:

This is probably faster:

tapply(scores, years, function(x) { f = ecdf(x); f(x) })

f() is vectorized :-)

Last, modification, I promise :-). If you want names:

> tapply(scores, years, function(x) { f = ecdf(x); r = f(x); names(r) <- x; r })
$`2000`
     1000      1700      2000 
0.3333333 0.6666667 1.0000000 

$`2008`
1500 2000 
 0.5  1.0