Boxplots: Definition, History, Extensions, and Examples

ABSTRACT

The boxplot as a summary display of a one‐dimensional dataset is typically credited to John Tukey (1915–2000). His ideas for these displays became widespread when Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) (Tukey 1977) was published; there he defined first the “box‐and‐whisker plot” and then the “schematic plot,” later called “boxplot”. Some displays with a similar flavor appeared 2–3 decades earlier. As a testament to its popularity, enhancements to the boxplot and extensions to weighted and multidimensional data have been proposed in the 50 years since EDA . In this article, I describe the boxplot's predecessors, define the standard boxplot, and review several other versions and recent enhancements that have appeared in the past 50 years. References to R implementations are cited where available. The goal is to clarify the boxplot's definition and origins, provide a review of boxplot‐inspired displays and extensions, including some for bivariate data (but excluding circular and functional data), and illustrate its widespread use for displaying data across many fields.

This article is categorized under:

Statistical and Graphical Methods of Data Analysis > Statistical Graphics and Visualization