On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> Worth noting that John Tukey in his Exploratory data analysis (Reading, MA,
> Addison-Wesley, 1977) did include a detailed example making it clear that
> box plots could no do justice to bimodality.
I'm not at all surprised that Tukey said that, but the limits of the
technique have been slowly eroded in the standard textbook
presentation. As I said, I think boxplots are a great tool, but there
are others, and in our rush to simplify things in the curriculum we
often present a lot of material as "here's how you do it" without a
really serious "here's why you do it" to go with.
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