plot box

Draws a box plot (box-and-whisker plot) showing the distribution of continuous variable(s).

Behavior:

• Visualizes five summary statistics for each group:
  • Min: Lower whisker (smallest non-outlier value)
  • Q1: First quartile (25th percentile) - bottom of the box
  • Median: Second quartile (50th percentile) - line inside the box
  • Q3: Third quartile (75th percentile) - top of the box
  • Max: Upper whisker (largest non-outlier value)
• Outliers are values beyond 1.5 * IQR (inter-quartile range) from the quartiles.

Input:

• Reads from files or standard input.
• Files ending in .gz are transparently decompressed.
• Assumes the first line is a header row with column names.

Output:

• Renders a box plot to the terminal.

Examples:

1. Draw a simple box plot tva plot box -y age data.tsv

2. Draw box plots by category tva plot box -y age --color species data.tsv

3. Show outliers beyond the whiskers tva plot box -y age --outliers data.tsv

4. Plot multiple columns tva plot box -y value1,value2 data.tsv