[GIS] Calculating Percentiles in ArcMap

Question

I have a large polygon dataset (26,000) records with numerous attributes columns. I wish to calculate the percentile rank of each attribute. Say I have population_density in an attribute, is there a simple formula to assign a rank in another attribute field on the percentile score of the value in the first attribute column (pop density)?

Answer 1

You can do this using arcpy in conjunction with numpy:

import arcpy
import numpy as np

input = "c:/data/usa.gdb/USA/counties"
arr = arcpy.da.FeatureClassToNumPyArray(input, ('population_density'))

##to create 3 rank for example
p1 = np.percentile(arr, 33)  # rank = 0
p2 = np.percentile(arr, 67)  # rank = 1
p3 = np.percentile(arr, 100)  # rank = 2

#use cursor to update the new rank field
with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(input , ['population_density','PerRank']) as cursor:
    for row in cursor:
        if row[0] < p1:
            row[1] = 0  #rank 0
        elif p1 <= row[0] and row[0] < p2:
             row[1] = 1
        else:
             row[1] = 2

        cursor.updateRow(row)

Just modify the code to adapt to your data and change the number of ranks as needed.