“…These have no definitive multivariate generalization, however, and a variety of ad hoc notions of multivariate quantiles have been formulated (see Serfling, 2002b, for a partial review). Here we focus on a particular form of multivariate quantiles, the spatial quantiles, introduced by Chaudhuri (1996) and Koltchinskii (1997) as a certain form of generalization of the univariate case based on the L 1 norm, and on a particular descriptive measure, spread. In particular, we treat the spatial "volume functional", whose values are noted by Chaudhuri (1996) to provide multivariate analogues of such univariate measures as interquantile ranges.…”