Thanks to both them for producing this very important visual and publishing it to the gallery. This week we have two submissions to the gallery about Box and Whisker – one from Brad Sarsfield and another from Jan Pieter Posthuma. This summary approach allows the viewer to easily recognize differences between distributions and see beyond a standard mean value plots. A box whisker plot uses simple glyphs that summarize a quantitative distribution with: the smallest and largest values, lower quantile, median, upper quantile.
BOX AND WHISKER CHART SERIES
We can see outliers, clusters of data points, different volume of data points between series all things that summary statistics can hide. The box whisker plot allows us to see a number of different things in the data series more deeply. In his words, the greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see and box plot does it perfectly. Half a century ago, one mathematician thought out-of-the-box, to solve this problem and came up with the box plot. This is also where other metrics come into play, like the median, 95 percentiles that can give us a better understanding of the data. Now we may be happy with that metric, but what happens if every now and then it takes 6000ms to load? The 300ms average number hides that alarmingly bad experience for sizable customer base. What if sizable number of customers are experiencing a slow load time even though the average is within the limits of our expectation? Imagine that we had a dataset that showed on average it took 300ms to load the app. While the average is often a useful metric, by itself is a lossy compression algorithm. Showing averages over time or across some series of data often allows us to answer questions like: How long did the app take to load in the mobile device? To answer this question, most commonly, we would find all data points for the day and then compute the average. But when you have diverse data points and sources, telling the story with just one aggregation to represent the whole range of numbers might often not tell the fully story.
By Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and Mey Meenakshisundaram, Product Manager
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