Contour boxplot

Okay kiddo, do you know what a boxplot is? It's like a way to show how the numbers in a group are spread out. You draw a little box that goes from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. Do you remember what percentiles are? They're like dividing the group into 100 equal parts and seeing where your number falls. So the 25th percentile means that 25% of the numbers in your group are less than your number, and 75% are more.

Anyway, so you draw this little box from the 25th to the 75th percentile, and you put a line in the middle for the median, which is the number that's right in the middle of all the numbers. Then you draw whiskers that go out to the lowest and highest values that aren't considered outliers. Outliers are numbers that are really far away from the rest of the group, so we don't count them when we're trying to figure out how most of the numbers are spread out.

Now, a contour boxplot is kind of like a regular boxplot, but instead of just drawing a box and whiskers for one group of numbers, we draw a bunch of boxes and whiskers for different groups all on the same graph. And instead of just drawing a line for the median, we draw a whole bunch of lines, one for each value in the group.

But we don't just draw the lines randomly. We give them a little color that shows how many numbers in the group are close to that value. So if a lot of the numbers in the group are really close to 5, we'll give the line for 5 a bright color, and the lines for values that aren't as common will be a little duller.

Does that make sense, kiddo? A contour boxplot is just a way to look at a bunch of groups of numbers at once, and it helps us see which values are really common and which are not as common.