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This should be the topmost comment. Box plots are made for visualizing generalized normal distributions and nothing else. Edited to preempt nitpick.
by blueflow 2y ago
This should be the topmost comment. Box plots are made for visualizing generalized normal distributions and nothing else.
Edited to preempt nitpick.
- cjk2 2y agoThis is also wrong. Gaussian curves are symmetric. Box plots do not have to be. In fact representing skew in a batch is one of the fundamental purposes of them.
- crazygringo 2y agoBut representing skew is precisely to show how "off" from a Guassian it is. Because real data is never perfectly Guassian, or perfectly anything. But the idea of a box plot is that it's for data which is in theory Gaussian or a similar unimodal kind of bell-shaped curve. Then you can look at the box plot and see if it actually is -- are the two boxes roughly equal-sized? Are the lines a bit longer than the boxes but not insanely so?
- blueflow 2y agoYou model skew in Gaussian distributions by adding an exponential parameter.
- pocketsand 2y agoWhy? They’re non-parametric and make zero assumptions of normality.
- blueflow 2y agoHow else would you calculate the quartiles to render the boxes?
- munch117 2y agoCount data points in each quartile. You can do that for any sortable data, independent of distribution.
- blueflow 2y agoIf you do that in your paper, you better write next to the graph that you did that.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoArguing that nobody who might be professionally expected to look at a box plot can be reasonably expected to understand how box plots are defined doesn't make a compelling case that using them is a good idea.
- blueflow 2y agoIf the method how the plot boxes are calculated is not clear (this thread references at least two different methods), you'll need to explicitly write it down which methods you did use.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> this thread references at least two different methods No, as the sidethread comment notes, there is only one way you can compute quartiles. You seem to be arguing that the correct thing to do is to impute them, and that calculating them is such a deviant practice that it would need to be specially remarked on.
- blueflow 2y agoIsn't this what i was saying from the beginning? Box plots are made for visualizing generalized normal distributions and nothing else. And now people in this thread argue you can calculate them from something else. Not sure if you are replying to the right post.
- munch117 2y agoBut is that what they're actually used for? The data has been reduced to three numbers, throwing away most of the information that you would need to assess whether the distribution is gaussian or not. If it's not, how will you ever know?