R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Chapter 8. Box and Whisker Plots

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating box plots with narrow boxes for a small number of variables
• Grouping over a variable
• Varying box widths by number of observations
• Creating box plots with notches
• Including or excluding outliers
• Creating horizontal box plots
• Changing box styling
• Adjusting the extent of plot whiskers outside the box
• Showing the number of observations
• Splitting a variable at arbitrary values into subsets

Introduction

In this chapter, we will look at box and whisker plots in detail, which are a great form of visualization to summarize large amounts of data by showing Tukey's five-number summary: minimum, lower-hinge, median, upper-hinge, and maximum. Box plots are a good way to spot ...