Track · 2:30 · Liner note
Reading Between the Box Plots
A box plot summarizes a distribution with its median, quartiles and range, and shows outliers individually, so the spread of several groups can be compared at a glance.
A box plot packs a distribution into a few marks: the median, the quartiles, the whiskers and the outliers as separate dots. Reading Between the Box Plots is the skill of looking at what it says about spread, skew and the odd points, not just where the middle sits.
Compare groups side by side and ask whether the boxes overlap, how long the whiskers run and who has outliers. Then check the sample size behind each one, because a tidy box of eight values is not the same as one of eight thousand.