# Need help finding weighted percentages

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by seph ir oth, Oct 10, 2016.

1. ### seph ir othMod'n Dat News JonStaff Member

Ratings:
+261 / 2 / -0
Hello,

http://imgur.com/txqDONS

So the situation: I am given anywhere from 1 to X numbers between -0.5 and 0.5. I need to give them weighted percentages based off of how close they are to 0.

I think it should look something like:

(1/X) * weight

And the weight is something like:

1 - abs(difference between red-line value and 0) / 0.5

But that's not quite correct ... Figure 2, the 2 red lines close to the center will have too great a % ... I want all the red line's % to add up to 100% ...

Any ideas?

2. ### jonasWell-Known Member

Ratings:
+42 / 4 / -0
Normalize the distance...

Code:
distance_i = | 1/X_i |
totalDistance = \sum_i distance_i
normalizedDistance_i = distance_i / totalDistance

Clearly the sum of all normalized distances is 1:
Code:

\sum_i normalizedDistance_i = \sum_i distance_i / totalDistance
= (\sum_i distance_i) / totalDistance
= totalDistance / totalDistance
= 1