So forgive the statistical ignorance, but how would one display mean and std dev in useful graphical form? (Asking seriously as it would be good to know which setting to press on gnu plot)
Since they show the minimum and maximum we can judge the overall spread, the mean tells us...well...the mean and first and second quartile lets us judge how close data is clustered around the mean.
See http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/candlesticks.html for gnuplot examples.
I suppose I am looking for mathematically faithful whilst still Omnigraffle good looks
Cheers
It would make sense perhaps to use standard deviations and means for some data, but in cases like this I think quartiles and medians make more sense.
For example, here's a histogram of ages of passengers of the Titanic: https://www.statwing.com/demos/titanic#workspaces/21
Or rents in the bay area: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/034b4af16d50a0ad35f1a...
Gives a real nice feel for the data.
These histograms are lacking in that they don't actually have the mean line or std devs on the plot itself; my general point is that if the goal is to get across a distribution, a histogram is the best way to do it, perhaps aided by markers for mean, median, std dev, etc., as the case merits.
Disclosure: I work at Statwing.
They're typically used for confidence intervals or standard error, but you can theoretically use them with any measure of variability as long as you're clear.