url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoen...@uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Champaign, IL 61820



On Feb 17, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Brigid Mooney wrote:

Thanks for pointing me to the quantreg package as a resource. I was hoping to ask be able to address one quick follow-up question...

I get slightly different variants between using the rq funciton with formula = mydata ~ 1 as I would if I ran the same data using the quantile function.
Example:

mydata <- (1:10)^2/2
pctile <- seq(.59, .99, .1)

quantile(mydata, pctile)
59%    69%    79%    89%    99%
20.015 26.075 32.935 40.595 49.145

rq(mydata~1, tau=pctile)
Call:
rq(formula = mydata ~ 1, tau = pctile)
Coefficients:
            tau= 0.59 tau= 0.69 tau= 0.79 tau= 0.89 tau= 0.99
(Intercept)        18      24.5        32      40.5        50
Degrees of freedom: 10 total; 9 residual

Is it correct to assume this is due to the different accepted methods of calculating quantiles? If so, do you know where I would be able to see the algorithms used in these functions? I'm not finding it in the documentation for function rq, and am new enough to R that I don't know where those references would generally be.


Yes, quantile() in base R documents 9 varieties of quantiles, 2 more than
William Empson's famous 7 Types of Ambiguity.  In quantreg the function
rq() finds a solution to an underlying optimization problem and doesn't ask
any further into the nature of the ambiguity -- it does often produce a
warning indicating that there may be more than one solution. The default base R quantile is interpolated, while the default rq() with method = "br" using the simplex algorithm finds an order statistic, typically. If you prefer
something more like interpolation, you can try rq() with method = "fn"
which is using an interior point algorithm and when there are multiple
solutions it tends to produce something more like the centroid of the
solution set.  I hope that this helps.



On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:29 PM, roger koenker <rkoen...@uiuc.edu> wrote:
http://www.nabble.com/weighted-quantiles-to19864562.html#a19865869

gives one possibility...

url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoen...@uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Champaign, IL 61820




On Feb 17, 2009, at 10:57 AM, Brigid Mooney wrote:

Hi All,

I am looking at applications of percentiles to time sequenced data. I had
just been using the quantile function to get percentiles over various
periods, but am more interested in if there is an accepted (and/or
R-implemented) method to apply weighting to the data so as to weigh recent
data more heavily.

I wrote the following function, but it seems quite inefficient, and not really very flexible in its applications - so if anyone has any suggestions
on how to look at quantiles/percentiles within R while also using a
weighting schema, I would be very interested.

Note - this function supposes the data in X is time-sequenced, with the most
recent (and thus heaviest weighted) data at the end of the vector

WtPercentile <- function(X=rnorm(100), pctile=seq(.1,1,.1))
{
 Xprime <- NA

 for(i in 1:length(X))
 {
  Xprime <- c(Xprime, rep(X[i], times=i))
 }

 print("Percentiles:")
 print(quantile(X, pctile))
 print("Weighted:")
 print(Xprime)
 print("Weighted Percentiles:")
 print(quantile(Xprime, pctile, na.rm=TRUE))
}

WtPercentile(1:10)
WtPercentile(rnorm(10))

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