summary: What does 1st Qu. & 3rd Qu. mean?

[donal30]

Hi All

I have a time series dataset which produnes the following stats from the summary function

Min 1st Qu Median Mean 3rd Qu Max
51690 57530 97330 112500 167300 216700

What does the 1st Qu. & 3rd Qu. mean? I cannot find where this is explained anywhere.

Any help on this would be very much appreciated

Regards
Donal

[vinux]

Its simple.
First quartile(Q1) means 25% observations are below this quantity(approx)
Third quartile(Q3) means 75% observations are below this quantity(approx)

See this link for more info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartile

[TheEcologist]

Hi All

Regards
Donal

I wanted to tell you to use the help function in R: ?summary
but after checking it myself I saw it was not very useful.

Therefore I hope vinux's answer helps.