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Data Visualisation Guide

Density, violin and raincloud plots

2 minutes read

Visualising distributions

A density plot is a continuous and smoothed version of a histogram. The biggest advantage is that its shape does not depend on the number of buckets like the histogram does, because density plots don’t use buckets.

3 density plots showing the bill length distribution of 3 species of penguin, plotted on 3 different base lines

Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Because density plots can be plotted on a single base line, they make comparing distributions easier than histograms.

The same density plots as above, but plotted on a single base line, so they are overlapping

Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC-BY-SA 4.0

When a density plot is mirrored and a box plot is overlaid, the result is often called a violin plot (which usually has a vertical orientation), or an eye plot (usually horizontal).

3 eye plots showing the distribution of the bill lengths of the 3 species of penguin

An eye plot. Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0

Another popular combination are density plots together with dot plots, or density plots together with jittered data points. This combination is called a raincloud plot.

3 raincloud plots showing the distribution of the bill lengths of the 3 species of penguin

Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0

Related pages

Data dense scatter plots

Binned scatter plots

Data dense time series

Distributions

RAWgraphs demo

Box plots

Visualising distributions