Box plot
Diagrama de caja (box plot)
- Date
- 1970 · confidence medium
- Place
- Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
- Credited to
- John Tukey
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Tukey devised the box-and-whisker plot to summarise at a glance the median, quartiles and outliers of a dataset, as part of his exploratory data analysis programme; he formalised it in the book 'Exploratory Data Analysis' (1977).
Mary Eleanor Spear had already proposed a similar range-bar chart in her book 'Charting Statistics' (1952), but it was Tukey's 1970 version that became popular and gave the box plot its name.
What it led to
- A standard for comparing distributions in descriptive statistics
- Variants: notched and variable-width box plots
- Violin plot (combined with density estimation)
Built on
- Mary Eleanor Spear's range-bar chart (1952)
Made possible
- Violin plot