Violin plots should not exist #10
Open
Conversation
This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
egonelbre
reviewed
Jan 18, 2024
|
|
||
| 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. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
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.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
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.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Box plots also do not have that information, so we should avoid them as well?
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
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.