Box plot with min, max, average and standard deviation

Question

I need to create a box plot with results for some runs - for each of these runs I have the minimum output, maximum output, average output and standard deviation. This means that I will need 16 boxplots with labels.

The examples I ran into so far plot a numerical distribution, but in my case, this is not feasible.

Is there any way to do this in Python (Matplotlib) / R?

Answer 1

The answer given by @Roland above is important: a box plot shows fundamentally different quantities, and if you make a similar plot using the quantities you have, it might confuse users. I might represent this information using stacked errorbar plots. For example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# construct some data like what you have:
x = np.random.randn(100, 8)
mins = x.min(0)
maxes = x.max(0)
means = x.mean(0)
std = x.std(0)

# create stacked errorbars:
plt.errorbar(np.arange(8), means, std, fmt='ok', lw=3)
plt.errorbar(np.arange(8), means, [means - mins, maxes - means],
             fmt='.k', ecolor='gray', lw=1)
plt.xlim(-1, 8)