Impaired boxplot functionality - mean instead of median
On 12/1/05, Evgeniy Kachalin <ka4alin at yandex.ru> wrote:
Martin Maechler ??????????:
Boxplots were invented by John W. Tukey and I think should be
counted among the top "small but smart" achievements from the
20th century. Very wisely he did *not* use mean and standard deviations.
Even though it's possible to draw boxplots that are not boxplots
(and people only recently explained how to do this with R on this
mailing list), I'm arguing very strongly against this.
If I see a boxplot - I'd want it to be a boxplot and not have
the silly (please excuse) 10%--------90% whiskers which
declare 20% of the points as outliers {in the boxplot sense}.
If you want the mean +/- sd plot, do *not* misuse boxplots
for them, please!
So I analize genetics data. I have some factor (gene variant, c(1,2,3)) and the quantitative variable corresponding to that factor. How do I visualize this situation? Compare mean of samples corresponding to factor values? Should boxplot support 'mean-in-the-middle', it would fit my needs ideally. How do I plot mean +/- SD plot? Also there is a way to rewrite boxplot.stats and replace "fivenum" there for self-made function. Then I would need to write self-made boxplot.formula (or boxplot.default?) function. And all this stuff would not be configurable. I'm still novice in R, so I need simple way to pre-visualize my data and estimate approximate result.
Not sure exactly what you want but perhaps thermometer plots would help? http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=129