The Box plot, or Box and Whisker plot as it is popularly known, is a convenient statistical representation of the variation in a statistical population. It is a great way of showing a number of data points as well as showing the outliers and the central tendencies of data.
This visual representation of the distribution within a dataset was first introduced by American mathematician John W. Tukey in 1969. A box plot is significantly easier to plot than say a histogram and it does not require the user to make assumptions regarding the bin sizes and number of bins; and yet it gives significant insight into the distribution of the dataset.
The box plot primarily consists of four parts:
The median provides the central tendency of our dataset. It is the value that divides our dataset into two parts, values that are either higher or lower than the median. The position of the median within the box indicates the skewness in the data as it shifts either towards the upper...