How to identify top 30% salary in python dataframe

Question

I have dataframe as follows:

Employee	Salary
Tony	50
Alan	45
Lee	60
David	35
Steve	65
Paul	48
Micky	62
George	80
Nigel	64
John	42

The question is to identify:

1. Top 30% gets a value “high”
2. The next 40% gets “average”
3. the Rest as "Low" -and put it in a new column as the corresponding value

it would be easy to identify top N of them but top 30% is something I am unable to understand how to go about the %. Can anyone help me with python code for this??

Answer 1

If you think about what a percentage actually is, it only shows the proportion of something. It depends on the amount of people in your list.

Therefore, the top 30% can actually be translated into a number of people.

Assume your data has N employees. Taking the top 30% salaries is the same as taking the 30xN/100 people that have the biggest wage.

If you order your data, then the only thing you actually have to do is setting "high" for these 30xN/100 people, "average" for the 40x100/N next, and "low" for the rest