In descriptive statistics, the quartiles of a ranked set of data values are the three points that divide the data set into four equal groups, each group comprising a quarter of the data. A quartile is a type of quantile. The first quartile (Q1) is defined as the middle number between the smallest number and the median of the data set. The second quartile (Q2) is the median of the data. The third quartile (Q3) is the middle value between the median and the highest value of the data set.
In applications of statistics such as epidemiology, sociology and finance, the quartiles of a ranked set of data values are the four subsets whose boundaries are the three quartile points. Thus an individual item might be described as being in the upper quartile