Papers › Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests

Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests

11 Feb 2019arXiv:1902.04023links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Ted Dunning, Otmar Ertl

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We present on-line algorithms for computing approximations of rank-based statistics that give high accuracy, particularly near the tails of a distribution, with very small sketches. Notably, the method allows a quantile q to be computed with an accuracy relative to max(q, 1-q) rather than absolute accuracy as with most other methods. This new algorithm is robust with respect to skewed distributions or ordered datasets and allows separately computed summaries to be combined with no loss in accuracy. An open-source Java implementation of this algorithm is available from the author. Independent implementations in Go and Python are also available.

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tdunning/t-digest officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
PavelVesely/t-digest mentioned on GitHub report
cmip6dr/_ReviewVarRanges mentioned on GitHub report
signalfx/t-digest mentioned on GitHub report

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