Box-and-whisker plots
Box-and-Whisker Plots Box-and-Whisker Plots
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- "The owner of a restaurant wants to find out
- more about where his patrons are coming from.
- One day he decided to gather data about the distance
- in miles that people commuted to get to his restaurant.
- People reported the following distances traveled."
- This is our data right over here.
- "He wants to create a graph that helps him understand
- the spread of the distances and the median distance that people travel.
- What kind of a graph should he create?"
- And you can plot this data in many different types of graphs,
- but they tend to depict things in different ways.
- For example, a line graph shows a trend over time.
- He's not interested in a trend over time, so a line graph doesn't make sense.
- Or a line graph could be a trend of one variable with respect to another variable;
- it doesn't just have to be time.
- But he doesn't want to see a trend here.
- A bar graph is good when you're trying to bucket things,
- put things into buckets and see how those buckets are performing.
- Once again, that's not exactly what he wants to see.
- A pie graph, you want to see kind of how things make up a whole.
- That's not what he wants to see right over here.
- A stem and leaf plot does help with distributions a little bit,
- but it really doesn't tackle the median distance and the spread really, really well.
- So the one that does -- and especially when people talk about medians and spread --
- is a box-and-whiskers plot.
- I'll show you how to do it right now.
- Box-and-whiskers. And what a box-and-whiskers plot literally does is
- it shows the spread of the data, it splits it into quartiles
- (I'll talk about that in a second),
- and it also shows you where the median of the data actually is.
- And that's one of the things that the owner of the restaurant cares about.
- So whenever you're dealing with medians --
- And box-and-whiskers plots deal with medians --
- the first thing you want to do is order all the numbers.
- 'Cause a median is really the middle number when you order them all up.
- So let's order this; let's write it in order.
- So, first we have 1 (so get rid of that 1).
- Then we have one 2 right over here.
- And then we have another 2, right over there; that's all of our 2's.
- Then we have this 3 (that 3) and then we have that three;
- so those are two people who've traveled three miles to the restaurant.
- And let's see, do we have any 4's?
- We have one 4 right over there, and then we have another 4 right over there.
- And then, let's see, do we have any 5's?
- (Actually I just realized that I skipped one of the 1's. We have another 1 right over there.
- So let's write that 1 right over there. We actually had two 1's.)
- And then let's see. Do we have any 5's? We do not have any 5's over here.
- Do we have any 6's? We have one 6 right over here. Then we have no more 6's.
- Do we have any 7's? We have one 7 right over there.
- 8's? We have an 8 right over there; that's the only one.
- Let's see. Do we have any 9's? No nines.
- Any 10's? Yes, we have a 10.
- Do we have an 11? Yup. 11.
- Do we have any 12's? No 12's, no 13's.
- 14. And we have a 15.
- (People must like this restaurant; they're traveling a good bit.)
- And we have a 20, and then we have a 22.
- So I've ordered all the numbers. Let me make sure I haven't skipped or gotten some duplicates.
- So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 people were surveyed,
- seventeen patrons of the restaurant.
- And we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
- Alright. It seems like I got all of them, and I've ordered them now.
- Now the median is the middle number.
- We just said that we had seventeen of these numbers. So we want the number --
- And since it's an odd number of numbers, the median actually will be one of these numbers.
- It's actually the middle number. It'll be the number where eight are larger and eight are smaller.
- So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It looks like this is our median. It will be the ninth number.
- And then you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 that are larger.
- So eight are smaller than 6; eight are larger than 6.
- So 6 is the middle number.
- If we had an even number of numbers here,
- we had two middle numbers, then we would take the average of them.
- But when you have an odd number of data points, then you can just take the middle one.
- So this right over here is our median.
- And then when you do a box plot,
- what you want to do is you want to find the median of the set of numbers that are smaller than the median.
- And you also want want to find the median of the set of numbers that are larger than the median.
- And these are called the first quartile and the second quartile.
- Because when you do that, you split your data into four sections, or quartiles.
- "Quar-" you normally associate with four.
- So let's look at this set that's smaller than 6.
- So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 numbers.
- So if you have eight data points, you're going to actually have two middle numbers.
- So, for example, you have these two right over here are the two middle numbers.
- Three less, three more. You can't just pick the 2,
- because if you just pick the 2, you would have three less and four more.
- And you can't just pick the 3, because then you'd have three more and four less.
- So these are our two middle numbers.
- So the median of this group right over here is 2.5.
- I averaged these two middle numbers.
- And then let's do it over here with this group. (I'll do it in blue.)
- So once again we have eight numbers, we're going to have two middles,
- and so it's going to be the third and the fourth number, which is 11 and 14.
- And if you average 11 and 14 --
- let's see 11+14 is 25, divided by 2 is 12.5.
- So this essentially divides the data into four sections.
- You have everything up to this first quartile -- so you have this first section,
- or this first median of the lower half of the data is 2.5.
- Then you have everything between 2.5 and 6.
- Then 6 to 12.5,
- and then everything more than 12.5.
- And so a box-and-whiskers plot is essentially a graphical depiction of this over here.
- So let's do that. I'm going to set up a number line.
- And let's say that this is 0.
- And let's say that this is 10,
- And this would be 20,
- And this would be 5 (a little bit cleaner than that).
- And this would be 15.
- 25 would be right around there.
- So first thing on the box and whiskers plot, you want to show the entire range of data.
- So our smallest data point starts at 1.
- So 1 is right about here. (This is 2-1/2, so 1 is right about here.)
- And then our largest data point is 22.
- 22 would sit right about there.
- And I'll even label it, although you often won't see it labeled like that.
- That's 1, and then that is 22.
- And the middle half of the data we do in the box.
- So the middle half is this quartile, and this quartile right over there.
- So the second quartile starts at 2.5. So 2.5 is right there.
- This is where we start our box, 2.5.
- And then our third quartile ends at 12.5.
- 12.5 is right over there.
- And then we can draw the box here.
- So the box shows where the middle half of our data is.
- Now I can draw these two arrows.
- So that's the box part.
- And then these two arrows are what you would call the whiskers,
- and that shows where all the other data is.
- It's really showing the spread of the data.
- And then the last thing we need to show is the actual median.
- And the median (I'll do it in purple) we already figured out is 6.
- So the median sits right about
- (so let's see, this is 5, this would be 7-1/2)
- 6 would be right over there.
- So with this one diagram, we've actually depicted all of this information,
- in terms of where is the median? The median is at 6; that is 6 right over there.
- Where is the middle half of the data? Well, it's between 2-1/2 and 12-1/2.
- And all of the data, the entire spread, for all of the customers,
- sits between -- and this is what the whiskers do for us --
- it sits between 1 and 22.
- And if you wanted to color-code it a little bit better, we could do that just 'cause it's fun.
- We could make ---
- So, this data right over here --
- and really, if you think about it, it's kind of inluding this data too --
- that's what this whisker is depicting.
- This data right over here (I'll do that in a different color.)
- is kind of the first half of the box,
- then you have your median in magenta,
- then this data right over here is the second part of the box.
- So that's all of this stuff, right over here.
- And then finally (let me pick a new color that I haven't used yet)
- this data is kind of represented by this part, by this whisker, right over here.
- Now there's one thing I want to leave you with.
- I use a method for this box-and-whisker diagram where for the two halves,
- I got rid of the median and I found the median of this part,
- and I found the median of that part.
- And that's the more typical method for box-and-whisker plots.
- Sometimes, when you find the median for the lower half and the upper half,
- some people will include this median in both sets when they calculate it.
- I just want you to know that's out there.
- But the way I did it is actually more the mainstream way.
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