IEEEtran: Placing a two-column figure on desired page

Next paragraph appears in page 11 from IEEEtran_HOWTO

Another LATEX2ε limitation (patched with stfloats or not) is that double column floats will not appear on the same page where they are defined. So, the user will have to define such things prior to the page on which they are to (possibly) appear.

So if you want that your figure be placed where Conclusions and References, declare it in previous page. And remember that due to next paragraph (page 9)

Furthermore, IEEE journals never place floats in the first column of the first page and rarely (if ever) do they do so in the second column of the first page. Middle in-text placement (“here”) is not used.

you must test it with enough text to fill more than one page, otherwise your figure will always appear on an empty second page.

This worked for me  

\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{images/classifiers-boxplot.png}
    \caption{}
\end{figure*}