How to interprete percentile information from the describe function in Pandas?
Percentiles indicate the percentage of scores that fall below a particular value. They tell you where a score stands relative to other scores.
For example:
a person height 215 cm is at the 91st percentile, which indicates that his hight is higher than 91 percent of other scores.
Percentiles are a great tool to use when you need to know the position of a value/score respect to a population/data distribution you're considering. Where does a value fall within a distribution of values? While the concept behind percentiles is straight forward, there are different mathematical methods for calculating them.
In your example 50% correspond to the median of the ordered values distribution.
In this case the median is calculated between two values: 1 and 2 so the median is calculated (in this case 'cause the number of values is even so the median as to be calculated between the fifth and sixth ordered values ) as the mean between them 1.5.