How to Remove Outliers in Boxplots in R

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 <- c(5, 8, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 25, 26, 30, 48)

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)

Boxplot with outlier removed in R

Suppose we have the following dataset:

data <- data.frame(y=c(5, 8, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 25, 26, 30, 48))

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)

ggplot2 boxplot with outliers removed

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))

ggplot2 boxplot with no outliers

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

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