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Boxplot or Violin Plot?

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


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.


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