Whisker Wars: The Outliers are Out of the Box

import pandas as pd

from plotnine import (
    ggplot,
    aes,
    geom_boxplot,
    geom_jitter,
    scale_x_discrete,
    coord_flip,
)

The boxplot compactly displays the distribution of a continuous variable.

Read more: + wikipedia + ggplot2 docs

flights = pd.read_csv("data/flights.csv")
flights.head()

	year	month	passengers
0	1949	January	112
1	1949	February	118
2	1949	March	132
3	1949	April	129
4	1949	May	121

Basic boxplot

months = [month[:3] for month in flights.month[:12]]
print(months)

['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec']

A Basic Boxplot

(
    ggplot(flights)
    + geom_boxplot(aes(x="factor(month)", y="passengers"))
    + scale_x_discrete(labels=months, name="month")  # change ticks labels on OX
)

Horizontal boxplot

(
    ggplot(flights)
    + geom_boxplot(aes(x="factor(month)", y="passengers"))
    + coord_flip()
    + scale_x_discrete(
        labels=months[::-1],
        limits=flights.month[11::-1],
        name="month",
    )
)

Boxplot with jittered points:

(
    ggplot(flights, aes(x="factor(month)", y="passengers"))
    + geom_boxplot()
    + geom_jitter()
    + scale_x_discrete(labels=months, name="month")  # change ticks labels on OX
)