Box Plot

The box plot is a statistical tool for graphically condensing an entire data set into a five number summary. The box plot requires the minimum value of the entire data set; the median; the maximum value; and the first and third quartile values. More specifically, the first and third quartiles are the midway points between the minimum and median and between the median and maximum, respectively. The box plot is a very simple way to see whether a data set is skewed one way or the other, just by comparing the distance between the median and the first quartile with the distance between the median and the third quartile. Another major advantage of the box plot is that it differentiates between the majority of the data and the outliers, thus making the visual representation more reliable than certain other methods of graphing data.