gnuplot Cookbook

Making a statistical whisker plot

Also known in the statistics world as a "box and whisker plot" or simply as a boxplot, the statistical whisker plot is a series of symbols, each one showing the mean value of a set of measurements, the extent of the central part of the measurements' or population's distribution, and the extent of the remainder of the distribution excluding the "outliers" (the outliers themselves are sometimes shown as dots, but we won't use that style here). This type of plot is also sometimes used for financial price data rather than the finance plot that was the subject of the Handling financial data recipe in this chapter. We will avoid the specialized language of statistics and further discussion of the uses of these plots, ...