How to replace outliers with the 5th and 95th percentile values in R

Question

I'd like to replace all values in my relatively large R dataset which take values above the 95th and below the 5th percentile, with those percentile values respectively. My aim is to avoid simply cropping these outliers from the data entirely.

Any advice would be much appreciated, I can't find any information on how to do this anywhere else.

Answer 1

You can do it in one line of code using squish():

d2 <- squish(d, quantile(d, c(.05, .95)))

---

In the scales library, look at ?squish and ?discard

#--------------------------------
library(scales)

pr <- .95
q  <- quantile(d, c(1-pr, pr))
d2 <- squish(d, q)
#---------------------------------

# Note: depending on your needs, you may want to round off the quantile, ie:
q <- round(quantile(d, c(1-pr, pr)))

example:

d <- 1:20
d
# [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20


d2 <- squish(d, round(quantile(d, c(.05, .95))))
d2
# [1]  2  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 19

Answer 2

This would do it.

fun <- function(x){
    quantiles <- quantile( x, c(.05, .95 ) )
    x[ x < quantiles[1] ] <- quantiles[1]
    x[ x > quantiles[2] ] <- quantiles[2]
    x
}
fun( yourdata )