Talk:Fivenum

The task needs clarification

• What the task is actually asking for is the 5 numbers used to draw a boxplot. This has nothing to do with "big data", or with producing a "smaller array". Requiring that the five numbers yield the same boxplot if they are treated as data is pretty useless: the task emphasizes space reduction, but it will not save space.
• There are several conventions for boxplot statistics. Not all statistical programs draw boxplots like R.
• Also, 5 numbers are obviously not enough to reproduce a boxplot, as outliers are usually drawn as well. This is not a problem if we admit we don't need the outliers.

All in all, the task seems to be "rewrite R's fivenum in your language". It certainly can be a task, but it's rather short-sighted: there are other languages beyond R, out there.

Eoraptor (talk) 20:35, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

License

The R function is part of the R source, hence has GPL license. Any translation of this is a derivative work. On such a simple function, I doubt it would be a problem, but please be careful next time: copy-pasting is not fine. Eoraptor (talk) 23:29, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

"This has nothing to do with "big data", or with producing a "smaller array". Requiring that the five numbers yield the same boxplot if they are treated as data is pretty useless: the task emphasizes space reduction, but it will not save space."

Everything in this quote is objectively false. I had a task in my job to make boxplots with huge datasets (> 120 GB of data) but all I needed were these five data points. It made no sense whatsoever to save every data point. I was doing this in Perl, since I don't like using R unless I have to. That was the purpose of the page. On the contrary, this task was very useful for me, but maybe not for you. I wouldn't have been able to make these plots without this task, specifically the Perl translation. "pretty useless"? on the contrary, this was essential, and I couldn't have performed the task without it. In the spirit of generosity, I decided to make my work in translating R's fivenum function available to others in case they had the same problem I did.--Hailholyghost (talk) 14:27, 26 February 2018 (UTC)