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I disagree about violin plots being better. Here is a great rant (borderline lecture) from Angela Collier on why they aren’t [0] [0] https://youtu.be/_0QMKFzW

• sanderjd 2y ago
  Could you summarize the criticisms in this (pretty long) video, and what she is proposing as a better alternative (beanplots? or is she criticizing those too?)? I couldn't figure it out from perusing the transcript. I think it's useful to be able to compare the approximate shapes of histograms during exploratory data analysis. Is the thesis of this criticism that this isn't actually a useful thing to do, or that violin plots don't achieve this, or is it "just" an aesthetic argument?
  • interroboink 2y ago
    Her criticisms of violin plots seem to be (1) they combine histogram-style information with box-plot-style information, when you generally would only want one or the other [ie: don't use boxplot for bimodal, don't use histogram when boxplot suffices], (2) The histogram-style information is not comparable between blobs of data, since they're not visually aligned, have no tick marks, etc — a plain histogram is better for this, and (3) she finds them ugly on a personal level. EDIT: Maybe she'd be fine with using them in an exploratory manner. She seems to mainly be complaining about using them in publications, meant for other people to consume. Also: I did not watch the entire video (:
    • sanderjd 2y ago
      Thanks for this summary! I definitely hadn't seen the point about comparability between blobs of data because of the alignment. But that really seems like an odd point to me, as I almost entirely see / use these with time series data, where pretty much the whole point is to compare the evolution of the values over time using their "vertical" location, with a was to see the shape of a distribution of values at each point in time, at a glance.
  • SebastianKra 2y ago
    Her argument that convinced me, is that the same result can always be better represented with multiple histograms - z-stacked, side-by-side, 3D or ridgeline-plots (ridgeline plots look awesome). Check out her examples at 21:11. Compared to these alternatives, violin plots are comically bad.
    • sanderjd 2y ago
      I watched that part of the video and I just truly don't think any of the options you listed here are as easy to parse as a normal violin chart. They look like the kind of thing I'd see in a superficial infographic, not a serious analysis.
  • Aachen 2y ago
    The two other replies are her main point(s), but the video also spends some time on another issue that she labels as minor but I found interesting to hear the perspective on. I'll try to do it justice: They look like vulvas. We're all adults, it's not a problem typically, but given that it's an aesthetic choice (noticing how half of the chart conveys the same info without this property), why? And it does come up, like if someone does make a joke about it, a room full of typically only well-meaning men will now look to her if she's comfortable with the joke and, what was okay before, now turns into a feeling of being singled out and outside the rest of the group
    • sanderjd 2y ago
      I'm honestly not sure what else to say about this besides: that's stupid. If someone is making that kind of joke and/or looking at the women in the room for validation ... how embarrassing for that childish person.
      • Aachen 2y ago
        Perhaps, but (1) that's apparently what happens nevertheless and (2) to be clear, I'm just (further) answering the question about what's contained in this super long video
        • sanderjd 2y ago
          Yes, I do appreciate the info! At this point, I could have just watched the whole video, instead of replying piecemeal in comments :) But I appreciate you summarizing it.
  • seanhunter 2y ago
    The summary is she is saying you almost always want to show one of two things (and not both): 1) To show the distribution, in which case just the histogram arranged horizontally in the traditional fashion is far better than a violin plot with 2 copies of the histogram vertically and some extra quartile stuff tacked on, especially since lots of standard libraries to do violin plots do kde with very extreme smoothing so the distribution they show can be very misleading as to the real empirical distribution. 2) To highlight the summary statistics (quartiles and median) in which case just the boxplot is better because generally these are hard to read on a violin plot In case #1 this is usually because the distribution differs significantly from a Gaussian in some interesting way that would make a boxplot irrelevant or misleading. (eg it is bimodal or multimodal). In case #2 this is usually because the distribution is Gaussian (or otherwise standard) and you want to compare it with other standard distributions. You don't need all the information in the histogram and to include it all would obscure the important point(s) you're trying to make about the median and quartiles. What is considered standard is going to depend a lot on the domain, audience and subject matter. In her case, she's an astrophysicist, so if you're looking at say red shift data from some observation, other astrophysicists will know the distribution you would expect to get from that sort of observation for example. That video is basically a summary of all the conversation attached to this article in some ways.
    • hoseja 2y ago
      3) They look like THAT
      • seanhunter 2y ago
        Well yes.
      • sanderjd 2y ago
        This I don't get, they usually look a lot nicer than other visualizations I see. What's the issue here?
        • seanhunter 2y ago