Describe how a box plot can give information about whether the value of an attribute is symmetrically distributed. What can you say about the symme- try of the distributions of the attributes shown in Figure 3.11?

What will be an ideal response?

(a) If the line representing the median of the data is in the middle of the
box, then the data is symmetrically distributed, at least in terms of the

75% of the data between the first and third quartiles. For the remain-
ing data, the length of the whiskers and outliers is also an indication,

although, since these features do not involve as many points, they may
be misleading.
(b) Sepal width and length seem to be relatively symmetrically distributed,
petal length seems to be rather skewed, and petal width is somewhat
skewed.