In this case, a more accessible alternative can be plotting a series of stacked histograms or kernel density distributions. Because of their unpopularity, their meaning can be harder to grasp for many readers not familiar with the violin plot representation. The next layer (if it exists) inside might represent the values that occur 50% of the time.Īlthough more informative than box plots, they are less popular. The next layer inside might represent the values that occur 95% of the time. For instance, the outer shape represents all possible results. Like box plots, violin plots are used to represent comparison of a variable distribution (or sample distribution) across different 'categories' (for example, temperature distribution compared between day and night, or distribution of car prices compared across different car makers).Ī violin plot can have multiple layers. In this case a violin plot shows the presence of different peaks, their position and relative amplitude. The difference is particularly useful when the data distribution is multimodal (more than one peak). While a box plot only shows summary statistics such as mean/median and interquartile ranges, the violin plot shows the full distribution of the data. Ī violin plot is more informative than a plain box plot. Violin plots are available as extensions to a number of software packages such as DataVisualization on CRAN and the md-plot package on PyPI. Recently it was shown that the violin plot called Mirrored Density plot (MD plot) outperforms conventional violin plots in terms of the identification of interesting structures in data in the programming languages of R and Python. Typically a violin plot will include all the data that is in a box plot: a marker for the median of the data a box or marker indicating the interquartile range and possibly all sample points, if the number of samples is not too high.

Violin plots are similar to box plots, except that they also show the probability density of the data at different values, usually smoothed by a kernel density estimator.

It is similar to a box plot, with the addition of a rotated kernel density plot on each side. Example of a violin plot in a scientific publication in PLOS Pathogens.Ī violin plot is a method of plotting numeric data.

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