Question

Briefly explain the Boxplot for data visualization and analytics and give its example.

Answer 1

What is a Box Plot?

A Box Plot is the visual representation of the statistical five number summary of a given data set.

A Five Number Summary includes:

• Minimum
• First Quartile
• Median (Second Quartile)
• Third Quartile
• Maximum

Mathematician John Tukey first introduced the “Box and Whisker Plot” in 1969 as a visual diagram of the “Five Number Summary” of any given data set. As Hadley Wickham describes, “Box plots use robust summary statistics that are always located at actual data points, are quickly computable (originally by hand), and have no tuning parameters. They are particularly useful for comparing distributions across groups.”

Box and whisker plots have been used steadily since their introduction in 1969 and are varied in both their potential visualizations as well as use cases across many disciplines in statistics and data analysis.

Here is an example: