Making a box-and-whisker plot
Do you want to visualize a series of data measurement (or observations) to show several properties of the data series (such as the median value, the spread of the data, and the distribution of the data) in one plot? And would you want to do that in a way where you can visually compare several similar data series? How would you visualize them? Welcome to the box-and-whisker plot! Probably the best plot type for comparing distributions, if you are talking to people used to information density.
The box-and-whisker plot usage examples range from comparing test scores between schools to comparing process parameters before and after changes (optimization).
Getting ready
What are the elements of box-and-whisker plots? As we see in the following diagram, we have several important elements that carry information in the box-and-whisker plot. The first component is the box that carries information about the interquartile range going from lower to upper quartile values. The...
