# Boxplot only display points

I have a rather mysterious problem when I try to do a simple boxplot with

boxplot(data$$sex,data$$freq)


but I'm unable to display box plot, and I cannot figure out why. The type of my variable are respectively factor and numeric, and the dataset is composed of 40.000 observations.

• You might want to log transform your data to better see their distribution. – leoburgy Nov 22 '18 at 13:52
• There are plenty of zeros there, so I wouldn't use logarithm... – Łukasz Deryło Nov 22 '18 at 14:14
• This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker. - From Review – kjetil b halvorsen Nov 22 '18 at 14:16
• Forget the boxplot for a moment, and try summarizing the freq variable for each value of sex. – The Laconic Nov 22 '18 at 14:30
• Thanks for the advice. However the OP does not explicitly state that the low values displayed by the box plot are true zeroes. I thought that the log transform together with the other answers could 'help' the user as they states. Finally I don't have the feeling that I ask for further clarification in my answer. – leoburgy Nov 22 '18 at 14:39

By default boxplot turns into points all outliers, which are defined as the datapoints that are farther that 1.5*IQR from box (IQR = Quartile3-Quartile1). So probably almost all observations with sex=1 are outliers in above sense.
Factor by which IQR is multiplied to obtain range of non-outliers is determined by range argument of boxplot function. Try experimenting with it. Plus, setting range=0 will force boxplot to treat all observations as non-outliers (whiskers will show min and max then).