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> So you can no longer reverse the process I've never understood this to be the purpose of a boxplot, only a means of visualizing a distribution's quartiles.
by Evidlo 2y ago
> So you can no longer reverse the process
I've never understood this to be the purpose of a boxplot, only a means of visualizing a distribution's quartiles.
You've gotten a flood of comments from upset people, so I'll keep it short by saying that a boxplot doesn't actually do what you claim for Gaussians, as the 0 and 100 percentile "whiskers" would be at plus/minus infinity. As for a bounded bell-shaped distribution, there are several non-unique ways to define such a distribution.
- crazygringo 2y ago> as the 0 and 100 percentile "whiskers" would be at plus/minus infinity The point is not to plot an ideal Gaussian, the point is to plot the data. In real life the whiskers are the actual minimum and maximum values observed.
- blueflow 2y ago> In real life the whiskers are the actual minimum and maximum values observed. Look at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Boxplot_vs_PDF.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Boxplot_... 0.7% of all values are outside the whiskers.
- crazygringo 2y agoThere are two standard ways of doing box plots. One is miniums and maximums, the other is the 1.5 IQR method. The very Wikipedia article your image comes from explains this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot#Whiskers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot#Whiskers