[R] boxplot statistics

bogdan romocea br44114 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 6 19:46:27 CEST 2005


A related comment - don't rely (too much) on boxplots. They show only
a few things, which may be limiting in many cases and completely
misleading in others. Here are a couple of suggestions for plots which
you may find more useful than the standard box plots:
	- figure 3.27 from http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/RGraphics/chapter3.html
	- violin plots (see package vioplot) - density plots - histograms
	- box-percentile plots (bpplot from Hmisc)
	- quantile plots
	- if comparing 2 distributions, qq plots, quantile-difference plots,
mean-difference plots etc.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karin Lagesen [mailto:karin.lagesen at medisin.uio.no]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 5:24 AM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] boxplot statistics
>
>
>
> I have read and reread the boxplot and the boxplot stats page, and I
> still cannot understand how and what boxplot shows. I realize that
> this might be due to me not knowing enough statistics, but anyway...
>
> First, how does boxplot determine the size of the box? And is the line
> inside the box the mean or the median (or something completely
> different?) And how does it determine how long out the whiskers should
> go?
>
> Also, the boxplot.stats page talks about "hinges", what are those?
> "The two "hinges" are versions of the first and third quartile, i.e.,
> close to 'quantile(x, c(1,3)/4)'."
>
> Thankyou very much.
>
> Karin
> --
> Karin Lagesen, PhD student
> karin.lagesen at medisin.uio.no
> http://www.cmbn.no/rognes/
>
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