violin plots should not exist

Violin plots are never the best version of a plot. They are hard to read and bad.
Violinplot: www.stat.cmu.e...
Beanplot: www.stat.cmu.e...
Most plots from Harvard Open Courseware stuff: www.labxchange...
Patreon (join for exclusive video each month): / acollierastro

[@KingBobXVI]

If I ever write a paper, I'm going to not use a violin plot, and I'm going to cite you for why I didn't use a violin plot.

[@acollierastro]

Great point. I demand citations every time someone avoids a violin plot in the future.

[@bearsaroundhere]

​@@acollierastroif I wasn't going to use one anyways, then should I still cite so that it's obvious why I didn't

[@ozymantiasVI]

​@@acollierastroI'll do you one better, when I review a paper and it uses a violin plot I'll ask the authors to replace it with a boxplot + histogram and cite your video

[@georgelionon9050]

Instead of people citing a video, should write a paper I suggest the title: "Violin plots considered harmful" (because their past existence cannot be undone)

[@xaxfixho]

Getting passive aggressive, annoying vibes 😮 Transwomen are women 🙋‍♀️🙋🙋‍♂️

[@AdrianBoyko]

Hello! I am the creator of the Turnip Plot, which is similar to a violin plot but rotated around the vertical axis and rendered in 3D. Please cite my paper. Thanks!

[@LimeyLassen]

Sounds like a lot of accidental buttplugs to me 😅

[@carpathianhermit7228]

Why do you need citation

[@ts4gv]

@@carpathianhermit7228 Turnip

[@hsm4983]

if u don't cite my beyblade plot paper in your turnip plot paper I'm citing u for plagiarism

[@samsowden]

hur hur hur looks like b*schrödinger'scat*tt pl*schrödinger'scat*g

[@BillTranmer]

I love your videos. It's like if science was a city and you're a tour guide taking us to all the places where people get stabbed.

[@Tekenduis98]

Funniest description ever!

[@donpietruk1517]

Could you make a violin plot outlining the distribution density of those stabbing areas for us please? I'll show myself out now. 😂😂

[@gravity_mxk5663]

Omg I’m dead 😂

[@samwiseshanti]

Omg please tell me you didn't come up with that off the cuff, what a perfect description

[@n20games52]

Also known as: Violence Plots.

[@davichk]

I used to work at a tight tolerance thin film deposition optics manufacturer. One day my current supervisor visited my workstation unexpectedly and asked, "you haven't been using violin graphs in any of your report generators, have you?"; "Never heard of such a thing. Why?"; "Good. I knew you were a smart one. Just don't. They're useless anyway." ... Later she quietly explained their inappropriateness. Turns out she wasn't just trying to prevent her team from using them either. The owner got top management together and instructed them to purge any current work of their existence. HE was smart.

[@SuND4a1]

This story is so wholesome.

[@SlenderSmurf]

Inappropriateness? Did they mean from a scientific or a social perspective?

[@luna010]

The technology exists for us to put 3d objects into .pdfs. For this reason, I propose the vase plot. The diameter of the vase is the probability density. or maybe the cross-sectional area is the probability density. It is intentionally ambiguous. Please cite my comment whenever you use my case plot in your paper.

[@jainabraina]

The inner diameter or outer diameter or cross sectional area (selected at random when you run the program, no the module is not seedable) of the vase is the probability density. uploading this to npm and pypi asap

[@marcellarisa7239]

Buttplug plot

[@rojnx9]

I suggest a 4 dimensional plot, called the aerofoil plot, where the aerodynamic drag coefficient of each 3 dimensional cross section of the 4d shape determines the probability density. Also every single 3d cross section is vaguely penis shaped. Please cite me

[@rbr1170]

How about a 4d object casting a 3d shadow? The orientation of a 4d object projects n 3d shadow where n gives the spectrum of possible densities depending on the k-orientation of a complex data mapped onto a 4d-manifold.

[@vaporisedair4919]

Call it the amphora plot, to get the greek creds

[@RandyGoble]

When I was in undergrad getting my degree in economics, I saw these every once in a while when conducting research for papers. Turns out I wasn't an idiot for not being able to read these plots, I was just an idiot for getting a degree in economics.

[@Gersberms]

I thought a degree in economics was a guaranteed job at Amazon. Is that still a thing?

[@therealpbristow]

@@Gersberms If true, that's the best reason I've heard for *not* getting an economics degree! =:o\

[@Bozebo]

@@Gersberms Isn't Amazon fundamentally bad for the economy so they're guaranteed to get only hire bad economists? xD

[@TessHKM]

@@Bozebo it depends on if you view "the economy" as something that's meant to serve small businesses/producers or something that serves consumers.

[@azlanadil3646]

@@TessHKM I think “the economy” is generally meant to serve everyone. Amazon is obviously not good for producers, and small businesses, but it is also in the long term bad for consumers. Yes it does provide them cheaper goods, but it also results in wealth being funnelled out of communities which kills small towns. It also results in worse working conditions, and lose pay for people in cities. Overall it’s a net negative to the living standard of the average person.

[@FordFourD-aka-Ford4D]

You'd *apply whiteout w/ the page STILL inside* the typewriter, wait about 1 minute, and then use the *backspace* key to shift _back a space_ to your mistake so you can apply new ink over the dried whiteout. Later on there were typewriters that could apply the whiteout for you. Usually electric ones. There were some other more esoteric solutions too! But yeah, most people just applied something directly to the paper and shifted back a space. Calling it "backspace" on a computer keyboard is one of many holdovers from the typewriter days. So is the stubborn yet incorrect convention of double-spacing after a sentence. (Double-spacing is essentially a typewriter trick/convention that makes things easier to read because periods are so small and on some typewriters don't offset enough. Single space after a sentence has ALWAYS been typographically correct in the world of typesetting books - plus print & graphic design.) We use a lot of old terms and symbols that don't apply anymore. Like saying "rolling" when a camera starts recording comes from the early days of film when there was a step to roll the film. Same way that many save icons are still simplified shapes of floppy disks - lots of kids grow up associating that shape form with "saving" without actually knowing it's a real physical thing. Or how how we associate the power symbol with turning things on (it actually was originally a standby-reset symbol or something but that's a whole different conversation.

[@NoeLPZC]

You have a source for that last paragraph? I've always heard the power symbol was a combination of 0 and 1 - a binary toggle for on/off.

[@MissaBrevis]

​@@NoeLPZCyou're both right - the 0 and 1 do represent binary states, but the version of the power symbol with the line crossing the circle was originally a standby symbol. If I remember correctly it was meant to indicate something like what we'd call sleep mode as opposed to turning something all the way off and on. The actual power-on-off icon was supposed to be the line totally within the circle, not crossing it. It's even still used in some specific cases now - I work in a lab and we have vortexers that have marked switch positions for on (line), off (circle) and touch-activated (line breaking circle) modes.

[@adora_was_taken]

actually most correcting typewriters had an adhesive ribbon that would lift the letter off the paper. there's a fun technology connections video about it

[@mykal4779]

this concept is called a skeuomorphism

[@ubahfly5409]

A violin plot to overthrow the physics department !

[@LimeyLassen]

There's no need to resort to violins!

[@offensivebeefroast5407]

Let me get the band together

[@PinataOblongata]

Plot twist!

[@wraithwrecker_]

I thought, "Well they look funny, but surely there's a reason why they'd be useful!" And then at the 8-minute mark, you finish explaining how you make a violin plot and I'm like, "Okay but why would you do that though???" I think it's a terrible plot already and there's still over 30 minutes of reasons to listen to. Brilliant!

[@michaelfairchild6768]

Violin plots are overused but they have a use case for comparisons of a large number of samples that have complex distributions. We use them for this when comparing gene expression in cell populations. We can quickly see the 'shape' and get the vibe of the multimodel gene expression for large sample numbers.

[@rikwisselink-bijker]

Exactly, the point of the violin is just the vibe. The data is in the box plot inside of the violin.

[@bordeterre5234]

Wouldn’t ridge plots work in that kind of situation ?

[@vsiegel]

My theory: The inventors of the violin plot were *literally trolling,* and call it internally the *pussy plot.*

[@somecreeep]

Well now I feel weird referring to the good alternative as a "box plot"

[@jainabraina]

I enjoy that this turned into a histogram appreciation video because histograms are really great.

[@marcins.1128]

When you made a mistake when typing on a typewriter you had to use a backspace then you would use a special white chalk covered piece of paper - put it between the typing tape and the paper then type the wrong character again - that would "erase" the wrong character, so you could use backspace again and press the correct key.

[@marcins.1128]

Now I feel really old.

[@HunchbackJack]

@@marcins.1128 I'm old enough to remember when those Tipp-Ex strips came out. They were an amazing innovation. Before that, you needed to use an ink eraser, or some noxious kind of solvent that faded the ink on the page. Later, some typewriters had the whiteout strip *built into the ink ribbon*. It was a magical time.

[@mercury5003]

@@marcins.1128 Im only 26 and I happened to grow up with one. There was one at my moms old job when shed take me as a kid and I'd play around with it. I'm not sure if the backspace function worked the same way though.

[@marcins.1128]

@@mercury5003 there were also newer typewritters with two tapes - one of them was the erasing one. They store some recent characters in memory so you could use the backspace as on your PC.

[@jtsiomb]

Or just cross it out with X-es and type it correctly right next to that or above that. Or use correction fluid, wait for a bit, then type over it (it always looked different though), or re-type the whole page.... depends on what you're doing and what are the tolerances for nice presentation vs just having the text on a piece of paper.

[@zeewirszyla]

26 minutes in: "They look like ____" Me: "THANK YOU! FINALLY!"

[@PatrickPoet]

Thanks for putting the last part in

[@Schnowotski]

A few counterpoints: 1) Violin plots are hard to understand. I don't see how violin plot would be any more difficult to understand than a KDE density cure or a histogram. If you know it's a density estimate - you know it's a density estimate. I think it's pretty obvious what violin plots show an how to read them. Then again, it seems there are multiple people commenting here that they have had trouble with this so maybe you are right, I don't know. 2) Why not just use a histogram? Well, couldn't the same point could be made against KDE (or any other smoothed density estimate): why not use histograms? You don't suggest this, but histograms aren't a panacea for density estimation and have their own problems. (Andrew Gelman has many times criticized R's bad default settings for histograms and I agree). 3) You suggest that multiple violin plots could be replaced with KDE curves that have a z-axis. I STRONGLY disagree with this one. Adding a z-axis creates more problems than it solves, since now you have to adjust in your brain for perspective. I honestly don't understand how you can sincerely suggest that this would make comparisons easier. You also have another example in which you replace violin plot with KDE curves (around 10:23). I think you made the graph significantly worse. I don't think it's easier to compare the distributions in your version, quite the contrary: the original violin plot version clearly shows the different shapes of the distributions, and you get an idea about their location and spread with a single galce. Your version, in my opinion, is more cluttered and difficult to read: it takes more time to disentangle the distributions from each other. There's also a greater probability of mixing up the curves (which curve is from what parameter/dataset or whatever is being plotted). --- I think violin plots are useful when you have to display many density estimates at once, for example, when visualizing marginals of a Bayesian posterior distribution. I don't think your idea of overlaying KDE curves is a single plot, or trying to use z axis to de-clutter them is any better or clearer; I think they might actually be worse. As a kind of "worst case scenario" consider that you want to compare marginal distributions from two 10-dimensional posterior distributions. Would you just shove all 20 density estiamates on top of each other in a single plot? Would you make 10 graphs, taking up huge swathes of space? Or just a single violin plot, in which the relevant density estimates are next to each other? You might be right that violin plots are overused in contexts in which information should be conveyed in some simpler way to people who might not be that familiar with density estimation.

[@gwheeler1609]

Correcting on a typewriter, we used a paper whitener. You backspaced, slipped the whitener paper between the ink ribbon and paper, and pressed the same key you pressed in error again. You backspaced again and pressed the correct key. Simples.

[@TobiasWeg]

I come out and say that I used the Violin Plots in my PHD thesis. I had grain size distributions to display. Histograms have the big problem that you can not well put a lot of them over each other. I had I think ten different samples I wanted to display next to each other (to make them comparable). Furthermore, I wanted to use the median to simplify the further discussion, but I also wanted to show the actual distribution. Of the Particles, as it was important for the behavior I was looking at. The Violin plot was a good combination of: 1. The median is visually represented. 2. I do show the actual distribution, so I can discuss the skew, if there is one. 3. I can pack a lot of them next to each other, the reader gets a good visual representation of the different distributions. 4. Yes, I find them visually pleasing, if done right. I did plot them horizontal, so. 5. I think the Violin plot is symmetrical, for the same reason as the Boxplot is symmetrical. And when I think about a metal grain, which I worked with). I thought like it represents the form of the actual grains. I did not add another histogram. I did give the smoothing value and normalized the width to one. As, I saw the second part of your video, I am sorry to hear about the unfortunate situation and that this plot makes you and other women uncomfortable, this is unfortunate. I did not know about this, and it was absolutely not obvious to me. I am sorry for that.

[@m.streicher8286]

Once, I loudly expressed that a piece of lab equipment looked similar to a "toy" - I still cringe thinking about my own behavior. The key difference being that I was an 11 y/o

[@KenoticMuse]

The comedy is pure gold. You're highlighting a good point that sometimes people go for "vibe" more than usefulness in published papers, and that we should scrutinize our charts more. In particular, I agree we should handle graph smoothing with more care and deliberation. However ... the violin graph is not that bad ... and I think 3D charts are worse (thank god they're getting out of fashion). Anyway, this is the first video from your channel that I've seen, but I dig the content so you got another subscriber!

[@mirmalchik]

ridgeline plots, though... damn that's fine

[@Tim3.14]

While I also find violin plots a bit hard to read, for something like the paper at 13:30 where they apparently want to compare 7 different probability distributions side-by-side, I'm not sure any other option would be much more readable. It's probably too many to overlay the probability densities on top of each other (although I agree that's a good option for comparing 2 or 3 distributions). I guess they could do 7 side-by-side histograms or pdfs. 🤷🏻‍♂️ (By the way, Fig. 3 and 4 you point to aren't actually a histogram of the same thing, they're a bar chart of something else. Note the x-axis isn't numeric, unlike the y-axis of the violin plot. Sorry to nitpick!)

[@ethanpayne4116]

I made a comment saying basically the same thing, the arguments in this video don't actually make sense in the context of the examples given. Even though I have never personally used violin plots before, I am now convinced that they are a very effective way of visualizing many distributions at once without overlap.

[@andybrice2711]

That's what I was thinking. But then the Ridge-Line Plot at 21:20 looks like it's probably superior in every way.

[@mattc2327]

As a PhD student in Bio, I was also on the way to say this. I have a lot of overlapping distributions for a lot of conditions. I think one solution is to distill your conditions into the truly necessary ones. Then, I think the ridge-line plot (or a less overlapping version of it) is definitely better than a violin plot

[@Daniel-ev1gx]

google ggridges

[@zelbinian]

What's this? A 40-minute video? Ranting about something very specific and esoteric? Subscribed.

[@Ziraya0]

I love these kooky patterns too! I first ran into this in Trello, where the labels (categories) are colored rectangles; but that sucks for accessibility. So they have Color Blind Friendly mode where they add distinct patterns to the colors. Everything should do this! I'm not colorblind and it helps SO MUCH!

[@LimeyLassen]

I've often seen them used in colorless graphs. It might be popular in Ecology.

[@TheBBQify]

i love watching your videos while i procrastinate on my physics 101 homework. makes me feel like i'm actually working

[@gabitheancient7664]

actually there IS a type writer that can erase stuff and uses some weird ass material science I don't know about to kinda suck the ink out after you write it, my good ol' technology connections has a whole video about corrections in type writers

[@pmcgee003]

I assume whiteout tape originated in typewriters .. as an auxiliary ribbon. People used whiteout out of a little bottle.

[@MattMcIrvin]

@@pmcgee003 There was whiteout tape that came in dispensers like Scotch tape. There was a way to shift the ribbon out of the way, and you'd backspace over the mistake and type it again while sticking the whiteout tape between the type hammer and the paper. That would type over it in white. My mom used this back in the 70s. Later, there were typewriters that had something like this as an auxiliary ribbon. Actually, more often they would use a carbon-based regular ribbon and the correction ribbon could literally lift the stuff off of the paper when you typed over it.

[@pmcgee003]

@@MattMcIrvin yeah, the IBM Selectric golfball typewriter was a beast to try moving around the office.

[@nos9784]

​​@@MattMcIrvin Ah, interesting! i just looked at my "brother AX310" electric typewriter. (heirloom) It seems to have a translucent correction tape, if anyone cares i might try to find out if that is how it works 😅

[@AdrianBoyko]

Typewriters like the Selectric were more like letraset than ink. They erased by using a sticky tape that literally peeled the “letraset” character off the page.

[@sharonminsuk]

Returning to academia after many years away, I started seeing these plots for the first time (and similar ones with no smooth lines or solid fill, just individual points in weird curved rows; what are THOSE called? ...Ah, got it from other commenters! "Swarm plots". I see more of those. Equally bad). First time I saw one, all I could think was "what the hell is that?" Took me multiple exposures to get it, but then kept thinking, "there's no x axis at all, yet the points are laid out along the non-existent x axis". This was the funniest science video I've seen in a long time. Can hardly believe somebody could talk for 42 minutes about this. Even more, I can hardly believe I watched the whole thing! thank you for brightening my day!

[@s_de-x6r]

each time she points to the void and a violin plot appears I absolutely and completely lose my shit they get uglier each time without missing a beat oh my god

[@joeszep]

They look like Christmas ornaments. Very festive...

[@yayayacutlikethat]

Violin plots give off real "it goes in the square hole" energy.

[@RobertBlair]

Do be careful with plots that heavily rely on color. Color vision impaired folks can't always read them well.

[@RobertBlair]

I'm also listening at work, so thank you for bleeping appropriately. And sorry that nobody told that turd of a guy to STFU.

[@Somebodyherefornow]

thats why everyone shiuld use pattern + color + contrast !!!

[@Flying_Basset]

Imagine replacing image histograms in cameras and photo editing software with violin plots.

[@ironnam8107]

When someone tries a joke like that. Just say something like "I was just thinking they looked like stingrays, and flounders. It will knock that last little bit of wind out of their sail, and you don't end up looking bad.

[@theprecipiceofreason]

Just one more way we seem to have lost the plot.

[@camf7841]

You bring up a lot of really good points in this video! I (maybe guiltily, now) honestly really like the idea behind violin plots, but I also feel like the standard way they are constructed in most literature does not do them justice. I’m an empirical economist, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a box plot and wished to have more granular information about the statistical distribution I’m looking at, while still keeping the feel/presentation of a box plot. I think violin plots could be a lot better if the smoothed kernel densities were just replaced with cleanly-drawn histograms with identifiable bins. That way, we could know what we were looking at, and it wouldn’t look vaguely sexual… which, let’s be honest, is the first thing everyone thinks when they look at these graphs. Also, I agree with your sentiment of “why has the aesthetic choice been made to reflect the densities over the y-axis?” It doesn’t make sense to show the densities twice. The one-sided violin plots should honestly be the standard, if anything.

[@toastedbread5985]

I personally like raincloud plots, since it gives you the granularity of including the box plot with all datapoints + the kernel densities. They can take up more room though, so including a lot of them all in the same figure can be challenging and overly complex.

[@Nato2303]

As an amateur writer, i understood everything you meant about a ''plot''.

[@bartg5418]

Damn. I've always thought violin plots were neat. But whenever I'd try to make one from my own data, I'd never be happy with the way it looked. I couldn't describe why they looked wrong, but your explanation totally captures it. I disagree when it comes to bean plots though. Bee swarm plots (similar to bean plots) can be pretty useful when you're looking at weird data with varying degrees of outliers. They give a degree of granularity that even histograms struggle with.

[@roytee3127]

This makes me feel so old. Here's an adult who has no idea how a manual typewriter works, or that in the 1920s they used ink erasers. (Hint: the roller had discrete detent positions, so you could move the paper up an inch or so to make the correction, then move the paper back to its original position. )

[@jonathancangelosi2439]

Seeing a violin plot gives me violin thoughts.

[@Matt_The_Hugenot]

When I was at uni in the early 1980s we handwrote our work and only when we had a our final version did we go to a typist and pay them to type up our work. Ten years later youngest brother used LaTech to type up his own PhD.

[@andreipopescu9197]

I first came across violin plots while attempting to build a data visualization system for performance test reports - this was during my first job, so I was a big newbie. I looked at them and thought "wow, neat! I've never seen anything like this, I bet the really smart people use these (since I don't understand how to read'em)". I then decided against using them since I couldn't read them.

[@ionsilver557]

As I clicked on this video, I was thinking about the kind of plots that are usually used to show the age structure of different groups of people and was curious as to why such plots are so bad. After watching it, yeah, violin plots should not exist.

[@ericbilly]

me, who knows nothing about plots and is completely unqualified to offer my opinion: yes, of course. i would absolutely call those quartiles

[@ThanksALott]

People making violin plots doubled the data, but forgot to give it to the next person.

[@stumbling]

Your discomfort at being turned to for judgement as the only "female representation" in the room is excellent proof of how the modern concept of "representation" is truly awful, dehumanising, anti-intellectual, and actively discourages women from entering STEM (or any other group where they are a minority). Do you understand that this behaviour is not normal or inevitable just because you are the only woman in the room? It was not always like this. Also, the other men did not turn to you because they were trying to be kind and respect your feelings, they turned to you in complete silence because they were terrified; they knew that this had become a situation where anything they said or did could be used by you (as the only woman present) as a potential weapon to get them fired on little or no evidence if you chose to do so. They turned to you because, given the insane social rules we are currently forced to play under, in that moment you became judge, jury and executioner on behalf of four billion women. If you were truly respected as an equal and not as an "empowered representative of vaginas everywhere" no one would have looked at you. So, remember this whenever you hear someone talking about how "we need more X in STEM", because whatever that X is, that person is going to be put in the same uncomfortable position as you, because we were all focusing on X and not on science.

[@EricaCalman]

The only reason you should really use them is if you are looking at a bimodal Chi^2 distribution and you don't know what gives rise to the two possible trends but like a lot of things when you have a hammer you start seeing nails everywhere whether they exist or not, especially when you only have to push a zero effort button to swing it.

[@chaotickreg7024]

If you only pay half attention, this sounds like a very complicated opinion about anime filler arcs. "Aiko no Cello" was an awesome anime but they jumped the shark with the recital because the violin plot that happened after should not exist.

[@davea136]

i too have invented some charts and graphs: Box Plot combined with a Sunburst Chart - The Surprise Box Plot! Radar Chart with a Histogram - The Bad Bicycle Wheel Plot Bubble Chart with Emoticons - The Mr. Bubble Plot Treemap chart with a Doughnut graph - the homer Simpson Chart

[@AndyBuildsStuff]

Great video! Your point about choosing a plot which conveys the most important thing about the data really hits home. Exploring one’s data is so important.

[@anon746912]

I'm going to make a violin plot function that uses a random smoothing functio

[@lilium724]

32:02 another example of that behaviour is what happened with the picture of Lena in the field of image processing there's a ton of technical reasons why this is not a good image to use to show the effectiveness of your algorithm, but also, it played a small part in perpetuating a culture of sexism in computer science, but when you point that out, some guys get mad and claim you're trying to erase history.

[@tinear4]

The Christmas ornaments at 10:54 would look nice on my tree.

[@tciopp2101]

If you wanted to joke about the plot, you could have said "Something about this shape has caused confusion for centuries, as it obscures the most important information"

[@lillyjb214]

Banger after banger after banger...Great video!

[@IronBelH]

For me, actual violin-looking plots show that there are more than one distribution in play. Acknowledging that and attempting to explain them (it’s always the night shift) leads onward. Force-feeding them into one distribution stunts your growth and discolours your teeth.

[@giacomo9039]

It would have been enough to just say: "violin plots are bad because ridgeline plots are superior". Regarding the other points: - You cannot plot too many overlapping density curves without the plot becoming confusing - Overlapping a violin plot to a box plot just gives more information about the underlying distribution, so I really see nothing wrong with that. - Choosing a smoothing parameter is no different from choosing an appropriate bin size for a histogram. Lucky, there are good principles that can make this choice for us. - For small datasets, it might actually be a great idea to plot the hole dataset, as one can learn a lot about the data by just looking at one single figure. - In medicine, people work with actual vaginas all the time and largely avoid stupid sex jokes. Blue Origin designed a rocket that definitely looks like genitalia. Let's not get mad about the shapes of things, but rather the sexist culture.

[@parthasarathyvenkatadri]

At the end of type writing there was this machine that could just untype a letter ..

[@keiraferrari7764]

Some of those violin plots would make Freud very happy.

[@thesatelliteslickers907]

"when a plot can be bad" ah yes, assassination

[@zsmith200]

It’s like a box plot that self reports whether it should have been a box plot in the first place

[@joep1937]

I’m using violin plots in my thesis (regretfully). Gotta be honest I didn’t even know there was an actual boxplot in there.

[@tedsheridan8725]

I think your last point is the biggest problem - the symmetric doubling is meaningless. I don't have as big a problem with showing the box plot and the histogram together (though I get that it's redundant), but show it horizontally not vertically.

[@criznach]

Most typewriters allowed you to apply whiteout without removing the paper. And some even had a white ribbon, to strike over incorrect letters. :D

[@dmikalova]

I remember seeing an asymmetric violin plot to show decreasing birth rates over the decades with M/F on each side and the whole time I was like am I wrong, this is awful compared to just using a stacked histogram. Thanks for validating my feelings!

[@dj_genrefluid]

I actually didn't get the reference until you said they weren't supposed to be symmetrical.. then I had a good chuckle about it.

[@CandiPinki]

To your last point, that same situation happened to me at my first job working for the military as a civilian. Someone would cuss in a meeting and turn to me to apologize. I was so confused until I realized I was the only women in the room. I get that they're from a different time (they were all 20-40 years older than me) but nothing made me more uncomfortable. Should I have replied, "I don't f***ing care" or "Did I give y'all the impression that I'm very religious or something?" I know it wasn't the second thing but maybe that would point out that they're pointing me out for no good reason.

[@Fadeways]

They should remove the extra half and place it horizontally to make it more obvious that it's a smoother bar chart and then its readable as you showed at 18:30 I laughed a lot at the vulva jokes thanks to your delivery

[@Crazycrazychainsaw]

I was totally in favour of violin plots taking up extra space and showing data badly for most of the video, but then I flip-flopped

[@AntonyAStark]

Yes, a lot of the problem with violin plots is the redundant ink used to make the violin symmetric. One useful criterion for a successful plot is that all of the ink conveys information.

[@ronytakchi7199]

I really liked the comparison you showed @33:57 that compares violin plot to ridgeline plot. That drove the message home.

[@klabauther]

The violin plots could be useful to compare histograms that make distinguishably different shapes for input categories, e.g. countries. The vertical symmetry could make the shapes easier to remember, because our minds are trained to look for these types of shapes. This is why it might be better in some metric compared to the single-direction half violins. for this, the violins must be vertical. I would also argue we need memorable labels on the shapes. The goal is to be able to shortly look at the plots, then look away and give a quick summary where we correctly name each country / input category. The problem with good old histograms is that it is hard to associate the different curves with the input categories, e.g. country names. This problem applies to most of the histogram options that were presented as alternatives in the video. The data lookup accuracy problem can be solved with interactive lookup, if this is a web plot. (All of this is speculation, I have no data to back it up. The main point is there can be different goals and metrics to optimize for, when choosing a chart type.)

[@MD-bf2ce]

Canvas uses Box Plots for a lot of my class assignment grades, I like it a lot.

[@scritoph3368]

the mad scientist plotting to take over the world cackles madly as he circles “violins?” on his list of evil plots.

[@David-gk2ml]

looks good for alien computers in a sci-fi setting

[@qcard76]

The smug cadence of speech here and how much of a non-argument is made up to this point really makes me hope that this video is a joke. 8:00 Will add an edit after finishing the video to note if this was really the case. Edit: Lol, yikes.

[@barrankobama4840]

It's not just aesthetic. These graph are purposely over-complicate to look very "truly-serious-scientific" and look good without communicating anything on news articles for the general public.

[@eewls]

devil's advocate: placing data points does tell the reader that sample size is either > 10 or

[@stuartwilson4754]

I used to love doing diagrams with a drawing board. Used to draw graphs directly onto Bristol board (light cardboard) .... sketch guide lines in soft pencil, then use rotoring pens to draw proper graph. It was very therapeutic. I also found that it was a very good way to think about data and plan experiments. Actually writing the results / discussion was a lot easier after you'd spent hours pouring over the diagrams and thinking how to present the data.

[@coyork15]

I saw a violin plot and I thought I was just dumb because I couldn't understand it lol

[@danielmartz4769]

I saw a comment about whiteout already, but it didn’t include everything, so I wanted to make you aware that in between liquid whiteout and typewriters with built in whiteout (AND multiple ink colors!!) we had these little strips of plastic that had white powder on one side, like toner I guess? It was the size of a microscope slide, and you would hold it against the paper and type the incorrect letter again, covering it with dry white ink. Then you could type over it immediately. It was very cool. 🎉

[@zorochii]

Looks like a leaf to me. Or when split, it's a hat, or an elephant engulfed by a giant snake.

[@denisfederiakin729]

My students call them "pu**y plots", which personally discourages me from using them.

[@miatomi]

the best part of these videos is that every time I start one I look at the title and look at the runtime and go "there's no way that needs to be that long" and then I finish the video and conclude that yeah, it did need to be that long

[@Jack-sy6di]

I think the airline thing at 11:28 ish is actually maybe the one reasonable use case for a violin plot - when you want to compare many many histograms to one another. Like if you want to compare three histograms okay, just plot them over one another. But if you wanted to plot like the age distributions for the populations of like 10 countries all at once, and have the reader be able to compare them at a glance, a violin plot probably makes sense. Like that airline thing would be kind of a mess if you plotted the histograms on top of one another, and if you just stacked up multiple independent histograms each with their own axes it's harder to compare them, and if you stack up histograms with no axes you've kind of reinvented violin plots

[@inafridge8573]

A ridgeline plot (like shown in the video) does this better, and you can make the frequency proportional to the grid behind each distribution, making it actually practical to compare them to each other After searching online, I'm actually puzzled as to why all the ridgeline plots don't have a grid or any kind of a labelled y-axis, it seems like it would be an obvious way to make comparing the histograms easier

[@Jack-sy6di]

@@inafridge8573 yeah I noticed she talks about that when I rewatched after making this comment, ridgeline probably does do this better for 99.99999% of situations

[@juanzuluaga3388]

In fact, I would find it very interesting if the distribution of an outcome is bimodal with no obvious explanation.

[@abacaba5348]

I remember when I was a small child my mom re-typed hand written works to a computer because she was the only person in the family who owned a computer and was comfortable enough with it to casually type stuff. Now I'm mad at a journal because their on-line live interactive proof editing app is clunky. How the standards have changed in less than one generation.

[@weatherupstairs4814]

s/ See now, you're just not getting the hep. The HEP. This is Jetsons wallpaper, and Jane his wife, stingray specimens, butterfly pinups, the era of Georgia O'Keefe orchids with extra keef, Googie architecture spatula trusses, retro-atomic sideburns with real uranium, narrow ties, pancake hats, bullet bras, Godzilla, minx eyelashes, lava lamps avocado-colored violins, pink champagne Speedracer anime, air-raid sirens, and no belly-buttons, whatsoever. Can you dig it? /s edit to add: I wrote this highly outlandish poem before I saw the Georgia O'Keefe reference and also completely concur with you.

[@acebecks6288]

Just starting high school and we're learning about different kinds of plots. Really helpful vid lol

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

The creators of violin plots saw things like Sparklines that try to put summary information in a small space, without realising 1) those summary plots are meant to, you know, summarise information, and not be the primary way to present the information and 2) the reason why summary plots work is that they're simple and elegant. "Like a histogram but more visually complex and maybe at the same time somehow oversimplified" kind of flies against that whole idea. Also, the whole "this thing looks like [foghorn]" ensuing debate sounds a lot like the whole recent debate in computer science / image processing world regarding the (formerly) widely used test image called Lenna. Which is a long story.

[@technopoptart]

alternative title; child roundhouse kicks ugly data expressions for 42 minutes (100% though i love your enthusiasm! it might be frustration and ire but it is quality frustration and ire)

[@KokoroKaisen]

26:30 "the fact these look like ________ is just a statement. that sentence ends in a period" boy does it

[@TheDogn]

You really killed the horse and then beat it into oblivion. This rant was truly murderous. If only it were enough to eradicate the violin plot from existence.

[@katrinabryce]

I mostly do visualisations of financial stuff, so my favourite is the vomiting camel chart. Remember to cite Katie Martin if you use it.

[@blabik]

In high school i learned about the existence of xy graphs in excel. Since then that is the only type of graph i ever used, and will ever use:D

[@Peanutcat]

And on this episode of Crazed lady rants about grapsh for 40 minutes

[@nikokaruneva2042]

Just a heads up that i am not a researcher of anything, besides my belly-fluff, but never the less, these plots are so meaningless, that the only three options i can ever accept for their creators to be, are either (1) pranksters in academia, (2) woefully confused/misinformed individuals, or (3) convoluted frauds. Its just painful to look at, when they seem to be giving multiple values at the same point, as if it is a "choose your data" adventure.

[@royrieder2113]

Your delivery style is the opposite of annoying! While there are many creators whose stuff I could not sit through 40 minutes of, always enoy yours.

[@CheatOnlyDeath]

I just learned something I didn't need to know. And appreciated it.

[@richardurwin4432]

Have you noticed that most graph paper uses a relatively faint blue colour? That is because photocopiers (before they became scanners) couldn't see blue well. If you were careful with the contrast, you could draw a diagram or a form on graph or squared paper and the photocopier would come out with only your lines on it. It was a great way to create forms, character sheets for RPG games or, indeed, the sorts of diagrams in an academic paper. Regarding the typewriter thing, you could get whiteout on paper strips. You backspaced over the error, poked the whiteout paper behind the ink-ribbon and hit the erroneous letter again. That deleted it and you could over-type again with the correction. The line spacing on typewriters is quantised so you can go up and down by exact lines easily. It's only when you noticed the error after you had taken the paper out that you would have to resort to liquid whiteout and fiddle to get the positioning correct.

[@mikedavis979]

In my typing class in high school (wow, am I really that old?), we used that method as well. We also had fancy Selectric-2's that had a built-in white-out strip! But i also remember just rolling the paper up a bit, applying white-out, letting it dry, and rolling it back down by the same amount. No need to take the paper out altogether. This would have been 1987 or 1988. The tail end of the typing class days, before keyboarding became standard, and Apple II's or Macs, etc., became cheap enough to replace typewriters, to teach typing. I mean, we had a few Apple IIs, but they were for "computer class", not "typing class".

[@richardurwin4432]

@@mikedavis979 That was around a decade after I went to school. In my day only the girls did shorthand and typing. I've cursed that fact many times during my IT career. By the time I realised it would be useful to be able to touch-type, I was too fast without to be able to stick to learning.

[@LathosZan]

I had a typewriter from my dad that had a little like tape strip in it for corrections instead of white out, and you'd hit the backspace key to go back one character spce and the delete lever would push the ribbons up so the correction tape was in line and you'd just smack the key for the offending character a few times until the tape pulled all the ink up, then you turn off delete and keep typing. You could even do neat stuff by combining some inked characters with other characters on the correction tape, like clearing a + across an inked M looked pretty cool, and it made good on-demand icons if you needed them for something.

[@richardurwin4432]

@@LathosZan That was a carbon ribbon instead of an ink ribbon, a plastic film with a layer of carbon on it. The rich people like important executives used those. They produced more professional-looking text because the ink didn't bleed into the paper. But the ribbon could only be used once; when the shape of a letter had been transferred onto the paper, it left a transparent hole in the tape. There was industrial espionage where people stole the secretaries' used typewriter ribbons and read the documents they'd been typing from the ribbon. Carbon ribbons were expensive and had to be regularly replaced. Ink ribbons just reversed themselves each time through and you kept using them until your text looked too faint. If you were enterprising you could even re-ink them yourself, in much the same way that you can re-fill ink cartridges today.

[@LathosZan]

@@richardurwin4432 Neat!

[@TalysAlankil]

i spent 27 minutes going "okay is she going to say they look like vulvas" and then felt very validated

[@ookazi1000]

Yeah, I was nodding along to the mechanical critiques of the plots, and realized about three-quarters of the way through the first half (I'm a bit slow about these sorts of things cause I'm an asexual cis man who ain't get none and ain't want none neither) that oh yeah, these do kinda look like genitals (and it only clicked cause one of em kinda looked like a penis and that made it click that the rest of em look like vulvas) and was like: Huh, That's weird: I wonder if anyone else noticed that, and if she's gonna mention it at all?

[@luckyape]

spoiler alert

[@GSBarlev]

Meanwhile I'm here getting distracted by the ones that look like stingrays. 🤷‍♂️

[@fburton8]

I call them snot plots because to me they look like gloopy boogers such as you sometimes see in kids with colds.

[@nickcarroll8565]

@@GSBarlevthe shrinks are going to have a field day with you😂