How Significant is a Boxplot Outlier?

By Robert J. MacG. Dawson. 2011

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is common to consider Tukey's schematic (“full”) boxplot as an informal test for the existence of outliers. While the procedure is useful, it should be used with caution, as at least 30% of samples from a normally-distributed population of any size will be flagged as containing an outlier, while for small samples (N<10) even extreme outliers indicate little. This fact is most easily seen using a simulation, which ideally students should perform for themselves. The majority of students who learn about boxplots are not familiar with the tools (such as R) that upper-level students might use for such a simulation. This article shows how, with appropriate guidance, a class can use a spreadsheet such as Excel to explore this issue.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29246b7268fcb2bdd4eb1618a7fe8d9787bbbba9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Statistics and Probability

1. Junzhou Huang
2. Kengo Kato

Citations in the corpus

• Robust Actor-Critic Contextual Bandit for Mobile Health (mHealth) Interventions (2018, background): “It is derivated from the boxplot—one of the most fundamental ideas in the statistics [4, 32].”