5/16/24, 8:18 PM Box-and-Whisker Plots

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Box-and-Whisker
Plots
To understand box-and-whisker plots, you have to
understand medians and quartiles of a data set.

The median is the middle number of a set of data, or

the average of the two middle numbers (if there are an
even number of data points).

The median ( Q2 ) divides the data set into two parts,

the upper set and the lower set. The lower quartile ( Q1
) is the median of the lower half, and the upper quartile
( Q3 ) is the median of the upper half.

Example:

Find Q1 , Q2 , and Q3 for the following data set, and

draw a box-and-whisker plot.

{2, 6, 7, 8, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23}

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There are 12 data points. The middle two are 11 and 12

. So the median, Q2 , is 11.5 .

The "lower half" of the data set is the set

{2, 6, 7, 8, 8, 11} . The median here is 7.5 . So Q1 = 7.5 .

The "upper half" of the data set is the set

{12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23} . The median here is 14.5 . So

Q3 = 14.5 .

A box-and-whisker plot displays the values Q1 , Q2 ,

and Q3 , along with the extreme values of the data set (
2 and 23 , in this case):

A box & whisker plot shows a "box" with left edge at Q1 ,

right edge at Q3 , the "middle" of the box at Q2 (the
median) and the maximum and minimum as
"whiskers".

Note that the plot divides the data into 4 equal parts.
The left whisker represents the bottom 25% of the data,
the left half of the box represents the second 25% , the
right half of the box represents the third 25% , and the
right whisker represents the top 25% .

Outliers
If a data value is very far away from the quartiles (either
much less than Q1 or much greater than Q3 ), it is
sometimes designated an outlier . Instead of being
shown using the whiskers of the box-and-whisker plot,
outliers are usually shown as separately plotted points.

The standard definition for an outlier is a number which

is less than Q1 or greater than Q3 by more than 1.5
times the interquartile range ( IQR = Q3 − Q1 ). That

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5/16/24, 8:18 PM Box-and-Whisker Plots

is, an outlier is any number less than Q1 − (1.5 × IQR)

or greater than Q3 + (1.5 × IQR) .

Example:

Find Q1 , Q2 , and Q3 for the following data set.

Identify any outliers, and draw a box-and-whisker
plot.

{5, 40, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 75, 102

There are 15 values, arranged in increasing order. So,

Q2 is the 8th data point, 50 .

Q1 is the 4th data point, 46 , and Q3 is the 12th data

point, 56 .

The interquartile range IQR is Q3 − Q1 or

56 − 47 = 10 .

Now we need to find whether there are values less than

Q1 − (1.5 × IQR) or greater than Q3 + (1.5 × IQR) .

Q1 − (1.5 × IQR) = 46 − 15 = 31

Q3 + (1.5 × IQR) = 56 + 15 = 71

Since 5 is less than 31 and 75 and 102 are greater than

71 , there are 3 outliers.

The box-and-whisker plot is as shown. Note that 40 and

58 are shown as the ends of the whiskers, with the

outliers plotted separately.

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