Hi, I need help on finding the value of my data that encompasses certain percentage of my total data points (n). Attached is an example of my data, n=30. What I want to do is for instance is find the minimum threshold that still encompasses 60% (n=18), 70% (n=21) and 80% (n=24).

manually to find the data value that encompasses 60% of data points, I tried something like:

awk '$1 >= 0.233 {print $0}' > threshold_0.233.txt
awk '$1 >= 0.234 {print $0}' > threshold_0.234.txt
awk '$1 >= 0.235 {print $0}' > threshold_0.235.txt

then I counted all the data if it correspond to 60% of n.
trial-and-error until I get all the values I needed at different %.

0.222568470365
0.221756265888
0.219760388204
0.242798143771
0.238352821721
0.241443756619
0.223094316003
0.228262624788
0.216889793498
0.210031152159
0.21097303707
0.207019965666
0.217014341085
0.239244868006
0.240522828032
0.237227034969
0.257647932043
0.248749576572
0.246545881317
0.247231196664
0.234222785343
0.235188699739
0.254819829246
0.250148878221
0.275682631829
0.287082318457
0.252075020326
0.412756783786
0.402542710592
0.227780278349

There's probably a way to do that statistically. Checking...

Thanks for having a check, .

Your data doesn't seem to have a normal distribution.

There's a much more obvious way anyway, don't know why it didn't occur to me before Sort it, then look past the % number of lines you want for the threshold.

sort -n data > sorted

awk 'NR==FNR { N++; next } FNR > (.8*N) { print $1 ; exit }' sorted sorted

rm -f sorted

Thank you very much Corona688. The data I posted is just a part of the whole data and those were extracted prediction values at certain points and might explain the non-normal distribution (?). Anyways, bunch of thanks.