adjboxStats function

Statistics for Skewness-adjusted Boxplots

Computes the statistics for producing boxplots adjusted for skewed distributions as proposed in Hubert and Vandervieren (2008), see adjbox.

adjboxStats(x, coef = 1.5, a = -4, b = 3, do.conf = TRUE, do.out = TRUE,
            ...)

Arguments

• x: a numeric vector for which adjusted boxplot statistics are computed.
• coef: number determining how far whiskers extend out from the box, see boxplot.stats.
• a, b: scaling factors multiplied by the medcouple mc() to determine outlyer boundaries; see the references.
• do.conf,do.out: logicals; if FALSE, the conf or out component respectively will be empty in the result.
• ...: further optional arguments to be passed to mc(), such as doReflect.

Details

Given the quartiles $Q1$, $Q3$, the interquartile range $IQR := Q3-Q1$, and the medcouple $M :=$mc(x), $c =$coef, the fence is defined, for $M \ge 0$ as

and for $M < 0$ as

and all observations x outside the fence, the potential outliers , are returned in out.

Note that a typo in robustbase version up to 0.7-8, for the (rare left-skewed) case where mc (x) < 0, lead to a fence not wide enough in the upper part, and hence less outliers there.

Returns

A list with the components

• stats: a vector of length 5, containing the extreme of the lower whisker, the lower hinge, the median, the upper hinge and the extreme of the upper whisker.

• n: the number of observations

• conf: the lower and upper extremes of the notch

  (if(do.conf)). See boxplot.stats.

• fence: length 2 vector of interval boundaries which define the non-outliers, and hence the whiskers of the plot.

• out: the values of any data points which lie beyond the fence, and hence beyond the extremes of the whiskers.

Author(s)

R Core Development Team (boxplot.stats); adapted by Tobias Verbeke and Martin Maechler.

Note

The code only slightly modifies the code of 's boxplot.stats.

See Also

adjbox(), also for references, the function which mainly uses this one; further boxplot.stats.

Examples

data(condroz)
adjboxStats(ccA <- condroz[,"Ca"])
adjboxStats(ccA, doReflect = TRUE)# small difference in fence

## Test reflection invariance [was not ok, up to and including robustbase_0.7-8]
a1 <- adjboxStats( ccA, doReflect = TRUE)
a2 <- adjboxStats(-ccA, doReflect = TRUE)

nm1 <- c("stats", "conf", "fence")
stopifnot(all.equal(       a1[nm1],
                    lapply(a2[nm1], function(u) rev(-u))),
          all.equal(a1[["out"]], -a2[["out"]]))