Boxplots

Boxplots

Lesson 1 of 1

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Boxplots are one of the most common ways to visualize a dataset. Like histograms , boxplots give you a sense of the central tendency and spread of the data. Take a look at the boxplot on this pag…
2
When making a box plot, the easiest place to start is the line that is inside the box. This line is the median of the dataset. Half of the data falls above that line and half falls below it. We …
3
Now that we’ve drawn the median, let’s draw the edges of the box. The box extends to the first and third quartile of the dataset. This visually splits the data into fourths. One-quarter of the d…
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The whiskers of a boxplot display information related to the spead of the dataset. There are many different ways to plot the whiskers of a boxplot. You might see some boxplots where the whiskers …
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The final piece of a boxplot is the representation of outliers. An outlier is a point in the dataset that falls outside of the whiskers. Outliers are usually represented with a dot or an asterisk.
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We’ve spent this lesson building a boxplot by hand. Let’s now look at how Python’s Matplotlib library does it! The matplotlib.pyplot module has a function named boxplot(). boxplot() takes a datase…
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Great work! Here are some of the major takeaways from boxplots: The box of a boxplot visualizes the median, first quartile, and third quartile of a dataset. The length of the box in a boxplot …

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