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violin plots should not exist

Angela Collier · 289.2K views · 2023-09-15 · 42:15

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Overview

Physicist Angela Collier rants for 42 minutes about why violin plots are a poor way to show data, citing papers on violin and bean plots. It is part lecture on how to read distributions and part opinionated critique.

On Hacker News

HN links it in data-visualization threads as an entertaining case against violin plots.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2023–2026

Topics

Data visualization & information designData science & statistics
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violin plotsbox plotsstatisticsplottingrant

What people said

j_bum · 2024-06 · Recommendation

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

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bjoli · 2023-11 · Recommendation

I have never liked violin plots,but I am very much not in the field of data visualisation. Just a week ago I stumbled on a video titled "violin plots should not exist" which made things fall into place: [VIDEO]

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seanhunter · 2026-06 · Reference

I see violin plots on the front page. Just say no to violin plots. In almost any situation you either want to talk about the actual distribution (in which case plotting the distribution on one side of the line arranged horizontally is significantly superior to plotting it vertically on both sides of the line for some reason as a violin plot does) or you want to talk about the quartiles etc in which case a boxplot is better. A violin plot basically tries to do both and as a result does them both badly. Extended anti-violin plot rant here [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Angela Collier , played through YouTube.

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