How to Remove Outliers in Boxplots in R

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Occasionally you may want to remove outliers from boxplots in R.

This tutorial explains how to do so using both base R and ggplot2.

Remove Outliers in Boxplots in Base R

Suppose we have the following dataset:

data 

The following code shows how to create a boxplot for this dataset in base R:

boxplot(data)

To remove the outliers, you can use the argument outline=FALSE:

boxplot(data, outline=FALSE)

Remove Outliers in Boxplots in ggplot2

Suppose we have the following dataset:

data 

The following code shows how to create a boxplot using the ggplot2 visualization library:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(data, aes(y=y)) +
  geom_boxplot()

To remove the outliers, you can use the argument outlier.shape=NA:

ggplot(data, aes(y=y)) +
  geom_boxplot(outlier.shape = NA)

Notice that ggplot2 does not automatically adjust the y-axis.

To adjust the y-axis, you can use coord_cartesian:

ggplot(data, aes(y=y)) +
  geom_boxplot(outlier.shape = NA) +
  coord_cartesian(ylim=c(5, 30))

The y-axis now ranges from 5 to 30, just as we specified using the ylim() argument.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in ggplot2:

How to Set Axis Limits in ggplot2
How to Create Side-by-Side Plots in ggplot2
How to Label Outliers in Boxplots in ggplot2