Re: [matplotlib-devel] is R wrong? (boxplot)

Hi Paul,

On Sat, 15 Feb 2014, Paul Hobson wrote:
>    As the author of the fix and the recent overhaul to boxplots

Thanks for that!

>  I can say with certainty that R is wrong! ;-)

phew -- thanks ;)

>    More seriously, the main thing that I take away from Tukey's paper about
>    boxplots, is that there are many valid ways to draw them. I personally set
>    up the new boxplot functionality to take the most basic boxplot definition
>    very literally. My guess is that R is fudging those rules a bit for the
>    purpose of completeness, or aesthetics, or ...(?)

well -- I was trying to figure out why the divergence from R's boxplot
help, but so far it seemed to match description/definition for boxplot
as in matplotlib.  I guess the next step would be to look "inside"
(running apt-get source r-base now ;-) )

>    Perhaps one can look at the purpose of boxplots in two different fashions:
>    1) Matplotlib: show some of the data and some basic stats
>    2) R (I'm guession): show how the data are /probably/ distributed.�
>    Obviously, I prefer #1. But I'm not going to say that #2 is wrong just
>    yet.

would you may be interested to adopt (or just do independently) an
option to e.g. plot the data point?  once I shared this one
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/www.onerussian.com/tmp/run_plots.ipynb
and the actual code https://gist.github.com/yarikoptic/9023331

I just never got to formalize it into mpl pull request :-/
-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
Senior Research Associate,     Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
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