Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

Box plot

The box plot is used to visualize the median value and low and high ranges of a distribution. It is also referred to as a box and whisker plot.

Let's chart a simple box plot.

We begin by generating 50 numbers from a normal distribution. These are then passed to plt.boxplot(data) to be charted:

    import numpy as np     import matplotlib.pyplot as plt     data = np.random.randn(50)     plt.boxplot(data)     plt.show() 

The following diagram is what is produced:

A few comments on the preceding diagram—the features of the box plot include a box spanning the interquartile range, which measures the dispersion; the outer fringes of the data are denoted ...