Angela Collier
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2026
42:15 · 289K views · Sep 15, 2023
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.
HN links it in data-visualization threads as an entertaining case against violin plots.
4 comments from Hacker News
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: this video
I disagree about violin plots being better. Here is a great rant (borderline lecture) from Angela Collier on why they aren’t [0] [0] this video
> There are other distribution chart types that can be useful in specific situations, such as frequency polygons, violin plots, cumulative distribution plots, and bee swarm plots, but the three types that I described above are the easiest ones to grasp, and are able to communicate most of the insights that are needed for day-to-day decision-making in most organizations. (I’m not mentioning histograms here because they’re generally only useful for visualizing a single set of values, whereas box plots and their alternatives are for visualizing multiple sets of values, which is a different use case.) There's generalizations and 'specific situations' which the author considers worthy of some plots, and other specific situations that the author doesn't consider worthy of other plots. At best, don't use box plots if your distributions do not have a single mode and may likely be misinterpreted is my takeaway. Here's a rant against violin plots by my fave physicist ranter[0] (not Sabine), so maybe never use them. [0] this video
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 this video