CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2violin-plot
Julien Colomb
Julien Colomb

Reputation: 563

violin plot: description for a paper

I find violinplots quite pretty, but the way it is calculated is difficult to grasp for non-statisticians, the documentation is quite rudimentary. I am using the default values of the geom_violin function of ggplot2 in R. Does anybody knows what I could write in the material and method part of the paper, or get me a nice reference for it.

By the way, is the use of these plots clever, even if the distribution of the data is unknonwn? (example of figure can be seen here: https://github.com/jcolomb/learningdata/blob/master/flightdata/analysis_R/firsttest_files/figure-latex/unnamed-chunk-2-1.pdf)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3020

Answers (2)

Roel Hogervorst
Roel Hogervorst

Reputation: 317

Hadley documents the source of violinplots here in de code: https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/blob/master/R/geom-violin.r#L20-L21

Which you would have found if you use ?geom_violin and read the documentation. He references: Hintze, J. L., Nelson, R. D. (1998) Violin Plots: A Box Plot-Density Trace Synergism. The American Statistician 52, 181-184

And for completeness here is the DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2685478

Upvotes: 0

Axeman
Axeman

Reputation: 35307

For one of our papers, that used violin plots with boxplots overlaid, we used the following description in the figure legend:

Parameters of inspection behaviour for the different treatments presented as boxplots, indicating the median and quartiles with whiskers reaching up to 1.5 times the interquartile range. The violin plot outlines illustrate kernel probability density, i.e. the width of the shaded area represents the proportion of the data located there.

This was agreed on after an editor told us the previous description was too technical, as he himself didn't know what violin plots were.

Upvotes: 4

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