Solved – What information does a Box Plot provide that a Histogram does not

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Histograms give a good sense of the distribution of a variable. Box plots attempt to do the same thing however, don't give as good of a picture of the distribution of this variable.

I don't understand why people use box plots. Histograms are better in every way. Is there a reason I would use both of them?

The only thing I think that box plots provide is: outliers! It tells us which observations may be outliers.

Best Answer

The fact that box plots provide more of a summary of a distribution can also be seen as an advantage in certain cases. Sometimes when we're comparing distributions we don't care about overall shape, but rather where the distributions lie with regard to one another. Plotting the quantiles side by side can be a useful way of doing this without distracting us with other details that we may not care about.