Violin plots should not exist #10
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egonelbre
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Jan 18, 2024
| # 2. Friends Don't Let Friends Make Violin Plots | ||
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| This is quite common in the literature as well, but unfortunately, violin plots (or any sort of smoothed distribution curves) make no sense for small n. | ||
| Violin plots don't help your reader to understand the data. The whole justification is that regular box plots may misrepresent multimodel data distributions, so you want to show the data. But violin plots don't have units and tick marks that allow people to actually read the data and compare the distributions. Also the selection of the probability density function for the smoothing is almost never explained, and may even be completely misleading with small datasets. |
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Violin plots do have quartiles and medians etc. on them, all the same features as a box plot. See the paper https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~rnugent/PCMI2016/papers/ViolinPlots.pdf
People do remove them, which should be avoided.
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Yes, they can have quartiles and medians. I was referring to the distributions' height tick marks, such as you would find on a histogram. So you can't actually compare the different distributions the violin plot depicts, you'd have to manually cut them out and overlay them, and still would be missing one axis' units.
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Box plots also do not have that information, so we should avoid them as well?
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Recommendation to completely discourage violin plots, since the data is more readable and actually usefully represented using either a histogram or a box plot. Here's a video explanation of the drawbacks of violin plots: Violin plots should not exist.