IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jss/jstsof/v028c01.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beanplot: A Boxplot Alternative for Visual Comparison of Distributions

Author

Listed:
  • Kampstra, Peter

Abstract

Boxplots and variants thereof are frequently used to compare univariate data. Boxplots have the disadvantage that they are not easy to explain to non-mathematicians, and that some information is not visible. A beanplot is an alternative to the boxplot for visual comparison of univariate data between groups. In a beanplot, the individual observations are shown as small lines in a one-dimensional scatter plot. Next to that, the estimated density of the distributions is visible and the average is shown. It is easy to compare different groups of data in a beanplot and to see if a group contains enough observations to make the group interesting from a statistical point of view. Anomalies in the data, such as bimodal distributions and duplicate measurements, are easily spotted in a beanplot. For groups with two subgroups (e.g., male and female), there is a special asymmetric beanplot. For easy usage, an implementation was made in R.

Suggested Citation

  • Kampstra, Peter, 2008. "Beanplot: A Boxplot Alternative for Visual Comparison of Distributions," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 28(c01).
  • Handle: RePEc:jss:jstsof:v:028:c01
    DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10.18637/jss.v028.c01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/view/v028c01/v28c01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/downloadSuppFile/v028c01/beanplot_1.1.tar.gz
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/downloadSuppFile/v028c01/v28c01.R
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/http://hdl.handle.net/10.18637/jss.v028.c01?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:cup:judgdm:v:10:y:2015:i:3:p:232-240 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. John Joseph Valletta & Mario Recker, 2017. "Identification of immune signatures predictive of clinical protection from malaria," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-14, October.
    3. Carolina Müller & Manja Hethke & Frank Riedel & Gerhard Helle, 2020. "Inter- and intra-tree variability of carbon and oxygen stable isotope ratios of modern pollen from nine European tree species," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(6), pages 1-35, June.
    4. Brzezinski, Michal, 2014. "Do wealth distributions follow power laws? Evidence from ‘rich lists’," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 406(C), pages 155-162.
    5. Michael C Thrun & Tino Gehlert & Alfred Ultsch, 2020. "Analyzing the fine structure of distributions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(10), pages 1-20, October.
    6. Marcos Krull, 2020. "Comparing statistical analyses to estimate thresholds in ecotoxicology," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(4), pages 1-16, April.
    7. Aravindakshan, Sreejith & Rossi, Frederick J. & Krupnik, Timothy J., 2015. "What does benchmarking of wheat farmers practicing conservation tillage in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains tell us about energy use efficiency? An application of slack-based data envelopment analysis," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 90(P1), pages 483-493.
    8. Andreas M Neophytou & Elizabeth M Noth & Sa Liu & Sadie Costello & S Katharine Hammond & Mark R Cullen & Ellen A Eisen, 2016. "Ischemic Heart Disease Incidence in Relation to Fine versus Total Particulate Matter Exposure in a U.S. Aluminum Industry Cohort," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(6), pages 1-13, June.
    9. Markus Demary, 2017. "Yield curve responses to market sentiments and monetary policy," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 12(2), pages 309-344, July.
    10. Vishva Danthurebandara & Jie Yu & Martina Vandebroek, 2015. "Designing choice experiments by optimizing the complexity level to individual abilities," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 1-26, March.
    11. Kolassa, Stephan, 2016. "Evaluating predictive count data distributions in retail sales forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 788-803.
    12. Sara G. Romeo & Ilaria Secco & Edoardo Schneider & Christina M. Reumiller & Celio X. C. Santos & Anna Zoccarato & Vishal Musale & Aman Pooni & Xiaoke Yin & Konstantinos Theofilatos & Silvia Cellone Tr, 2023. "Human blood vessel organoids reveal a critical role for CTGF in maintaining microvascular integrity," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-18, December.
    13. Miroslav Sirota & Marie Juanchich, 2015. "A direct and comprehensive test of two postulates of politeness theory applied to uncertainty communication," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 10(3), pages 232-240, May.
    14. Manuel Mendoza-Carranza & Elisabet Ejarque & Leopold A J Nagelkerke, 2018. "Disentangling the complexity of tropical small-scale fisheries dynamics using supervised Self-Organizing Maps," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(5), pages 1-28, May.
    15. Barrios Ramos, Iris & Espinoza Tenorio, Alejandro & Mesa Jurado, M. Azahara & Tovilla Hernández, Cristian & Mendoza Carranza, Manuel, 2021. "Percepción social de la salinización del agua para uso doméstico en Puerto Madero, Chiapas, México," Economia Agraria y Recursos Naturales, Spanish Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 21(01), June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jss:jstsof:v:028:c01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jstatsoft.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.