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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

Box plots can still obscure the nature of a distribution, e.g. it might be multi-modal.

Violin plots + outlier dots + additional markers are more helpful. Sometimes the CDF is also more useful than the PDF, e.g. for latencies.

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I dislike violin plots because they don’t give a good sense of how many points there are overall, and this can be very misleading if you’re trying to compare segments of different size. They also look like female genitalia and I’m 100% serious when I say this tends to distract people for laughs.

I like swarm plots for this kind of task.

https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.swarmplot.html

Edit: well, I suppose I should clarify the comment on violin plots is implementation dependent and biased by my personal preferences for visualization libraries

The plots on that page seem to exhibit some clustering and weird shapes which might not be all that great for discrete data or if you have sampling artifacts since it distracts from the overall shape of the distribution.

Showing the number of samples is good though. The combined version seems useful.

> don’t give a good sense of how many points there are overall

Consider inner="stick" from [1] instead. It probably comes closer to what you're looking for.

[1] https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.violinplot.html

I find raincloud plots to be the best of both worlds, and they have been my preference lately:

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/4-63/v1

They can visualize common statistics like box-plots, the distribution shape like violin plots, as well as the raw data!

Oh, that is quite nice. Communicates a lot in a single chart.

Violin plots are harder to parse at a glance.

Like all data visualization techniques, which plot type is better depends on the context.

I wholeheartedly agree! Violin plots are a great way to get a dense appreciation for a distribution. Multi-modal distributions are completely masked by mean, even median+std.

This entire thread is great, 10 data scientists all want their own special chart to be the best. You are all wrong, you should have a view of all these charts!!!! hahaha

Seems like a good idea, I wish I had more of a statistical background for this kind of thing. Seems like it'd have proved more useful for most software purposes than the calculus I had to take instead as a prerequisite.

It's basically just my boss making suggestions and me implementing, so the results are probably less than optimal for this kind of thing.

Even more generally speaking, there's more than a few people saying we should elevate learning statistics over calculus in the general maths curriculum. Arguably it's even more important than trig and geometry.

[0] is just one of the first results from a search that makes this case.

[0] https://stanfordreview.org/calculus-is-overrated-why-we-shou...

Or a similar is to violin plots - heat map / waterfall.

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