Boxplot or Violin Plot?

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-09-27 | tags: data visualization data science

Which would you choose? Let's figure out which might be more useful.

The same data, different visualizations.

Here's the box plot version:

Data plotted using Seaborn's box plot.

And here's the violin plot version.

Data plotted using Seaborn's violin plot.

Which is more appropriate, and why?

I think the Box Plot is more suited for clearly delineating ranges: (min, max), (IQR), and medians, whereas the Violin Plot is more suited for visualizing the distribution of data, including the possibility of bi-/multi-modality.

Cite this blog post:

@article{
    ericmjl-2016-boxplot-plot,
    author = {Eric J. Ma},
    title = {Boxplot or Violin Plot?},
    year = {2016},
    month = {09},
    day = {27},
    howpublished = {\url{https://ericmjl.github.io}},
    journal = {Eric J. Ma's Blog},
    url = {https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2016/9/27/boxplot-or-violin-plot},
}

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