11–20 of 258 posts
IMO a good takeaway might be to always use a plot that fairly represents the underlying distribution.
I feel like this is where the confusion stems from for the author and everyone else here. Box plots don't make anything bell shaped (they don't change the distribution), they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. This is correct in cases where the central limit theorem can be applied (which is almost everywhere) - but when that is not the case, the assumption is wrong and you shouldn't use a box plot anyways, because the values it shows have no real use. There are very real use cases for box plots, but people need to understand the basics of statistics before they can use them.
So the diagram should not be used because of an education problem with some audiences? Isn't that a bit like banning cars because some people can't drive? Some diagrams are simply not for mass consumption and this is one, particularly because it is designed to illustrate an interpretation of ranges instead of the direct/linear representation of the raw data. Of course I'd illustrate this fact as a Venn diagram compar…
>box plots always make distributions look bell shaped I feel like this is where the confusion stems from for the author and everyone else here. Box plots don't make anything bell shaped (they don't change the distribution), they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. This is correct in cases where the central limit theorem can be applied (which is almost everywhere) - but when that is not the case, the…
Edited to preempt nitpick.
>box plots always make distributions look bell shaped I feel like this is where the confusion stems from for the author and everyone else here. Box plots don't make anything bell shaped (they don't change the distribution), they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. This is correct in cases where the central limit theorem can be applied (which is almost everywhere) - but when that is not the case, the…
People waltz in with assumptions and then complain when they don’t work because they don’t really understand the tools they are using. The author is one of them. It’s a bad article and the author should not be using or demonstrating things they clearly don't understand.
just use boxplots with an overlay of the actual data and any confusion goes away
So the diagram should not be used because of an education problem with some audiences? Isn't that a bit like banning cars because some people can't drive? Some diagrams are simply not for mass consumption and this is one, particularly because it is designed to illustrate an interpretation of ranges instead of the direct/linear representation of the raw data. Of course I'd illustrate this fact as a Venn diagram compar…
We have better technology nowadays, including for plotting, so why not ditch the old?
The author of the blog post has some good arguments. From your post, I cannot distill an argument as to why you would prefer specifically a box plot over a strip plot.
The author just has a bad intuition. On the first picture he says "this looks like a small quantity". No, you can't say that. All you can say is that half the data points are in the shades part. You don't know where the rest are.
>box plots always make distributions look bell shaped I feel like this is where the confusion stems from for the author and everyone else here. Box plots don't make anything bell shaped (they don't change the distribution), they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. This is correct in cases where the central limit theorem can be applied (which is almost everywhere) - but when that is not the case, the…
This should be the topmost comment. Box plots are made for visualizing generalized normal distributions and nothing else. Edited to preempt nitpick.
What about violin plots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_plot
* There's another intermediary concept (kernel density estimation) between the audience and the data
* They're still likely to misrepresent tight groupings and discontinuities, which will be smoothed out