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Comment by montebicyclelo | Hacker News Reader

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montebicyclelo

The author has experience of teaching box plots in various organisations.

The author has found that compared to other types of plots, people struggle to learn how to intepret box plots.

The author proposes some alternatives that they believe to be easier for people to interpret:

- Strip plots (for few data points)

- Jittered strip plots (for more data points)

- Distribution heatmap (for even more data points)

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This aligns with my experience of trying to convey information to non-technical or moderately technical people; box plots are a struggle for them. To me it does seem like the proposed alternatives would be more accessible.

Sure, we could try to better educate people about box plots, (as the author has done professionally); or we could consider using something that requires less effort for people to comprehend.

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I'm not suggesting that the other diagrams shouldn't be used, just that box diagrams aren't wrong, they hide data, which is sometimes useful.

I wish we could educate everyone in the ways data can be misrepresented - scale, non 0 axis starting, omitting categories, combining groups, colours, point sizes not representative of data - and they can all be levelled at other graph types, singling out box plots for hiding is no different, but IMHO not justification for not using them with the right audience.

Yeah I'm shocked at the awful quality of comments here. This is a clear and straightforward article laying out the issues with box plots and appropriate alternatives, from a professional who works in the field and spends his life explaining these.

And still half the comments are like "But I know better!"... yeah, I'd wager most here don't.

I'm qualified in maths related computing and statistics to exam invigilator level, if that helps offset your bias.

No bias -- By commenting a lot, you're overrepresenting the average HN audience. Which kind of nullifies your point, doesn't it?

You argue in other comments that it's just an education problem, but box plots are used with people who don't have this exact education you mention, and the article explains that a drawback of box plots is exactly that it isn't intuitive and takes several minutes of explanations.

In other words, the article says "I've stopped using this because they require education", and your retort is "Don't stop using these, you just need to educate people".

That background would make you explicitly unqualified to asses the quality of box plots as a visualization method. Box plots are used throughout various fields of research that are far less mathematical in nature.

Rubbish. They're used extensively in probability statistics and confidence intervals. Field of research has bugger all to do with it :tears:

You not understanding what my comment means is incredibly thematic.

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