Topics: Statistics - Graphical Representations of Statistical Data
A box plot is a graph that shows the behaviour of a series of numerical data with the help of its quartiles.
(courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Elements
Box plots display data by summarising it with the following five elements:
- The minimum (0th percentile), the lowest data point in the dataset
- The maximum (100th percentile), the highest data point in the dataset
- The median, the middle value in the dataset
- The first quartile (25th percentile), the median of the lower half of the dataset
- The third quartile (75th percentile), the median of the upper half of the dataset
Box plots also use the interquartile ranges (IQR), which is the distance between the first and the third quartiles.