Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've stopped using box plots (2021)

nightingaledvs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 258 posts

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#51

Post by jhbadger »

mkl wrote: post #21

The only advantage box plots had is that they can be drawn by hand. Now that computers are ubiquitous this is no longer valuable. Violin plots and bee swarm plots are better. Jittered strip plots can be okay if you're careful to avoid saturation (or more points added in the saturated region will disappear as they can't make it any darker).

I'm surprised the article just briefly mentions violin plots. Those are becoming popular in biomedical research -- much more common than the plots he suggests. And you can always overlay them with the jittered points if you want too.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#52

Post by These335 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #32
Beldin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Box plots [...] assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. Not sure how to square that with this statement on Wikipedia's page on box plots: Box plots are non-parametric: they display variation in samples of a statistical population without making any assumptions of the underlying statistical distribution[3]

If you want to see why that is not fully correct you should read the article. For a box plot you need to calculate mean, variance and certain percentiles. These values don't make sense if your distribution does not follow a certain shape (because these values unambiguously define such a shape). See the examples in the article for what happens if you still try to use them in those cases. You can still extract the valu…

Mean and variance have nothing to do with boxplots, you are mistaken.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#53

Post by SillyUsername »

scrollaway wrote: post #49
montebicyclelo wrote: post #26

The author has experience of teaching box plots in various organisations. The author has found that compared to other types of plots, people struggle to learn how to intepret box plots. The author proposes some alternatives that they believe to be easier for people to interpret: - Strip plots (for few data points) - Jittered strip plots (for more data points) - Distribution heatmap (for even more data points) ---- Th…

Yeah I'm shocked at the awful quality of comments here. This is a clear and straightforward article laying out the issues with box plots and appropriate alternatives, from a professional who works in the field and spends his life explaining these. And still half the comments are like "But I know better!"... yeah, I'd wager most here don't.

I'm qualified in maths related computing and statistics to exam invigilator level, if that helps offset your bias.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#54

Post by ncruces »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #3

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.

> You don't know where the rest are.

Of course you do: they're in the whiskers; half in each whisker.

That's the entire point of the picture, BTW.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#55

Post by wodenokoto »

I’m a big fan of the jittered strip plot and I often ad special logic to color dots at the edges of a largish gap. This is super useful if you are plotting the distribution of daily messages and just plotting dots will hide that there are days without messages

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#56

Post by IanCal »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #12

>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…

> they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape

No they don't. They show quartiles mostly, and don't assume symmetry or any parameters of a gaussian.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#57

Post by These335 »

Sure there are alternatives and I agree with the author's criticisms overall. But boxplots are a staple in statistics, and if your audience can reasonably be assumed to have some level of statistical training then boxplots are perfectly reasonable in my opinion.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#58

Post by IanCal »

IshKebab wrote: post #39
Scea91 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use violin plots but a complication is that the shape depends upon the bandwidth hyperparameter of the kernel density estimator that is used inside. The plot can differ a lot for different bandwidth values. Selection of the 'proper' bandwidth is a classic bias-variance tradeoff problem.

While true, that's not an additional problem compared to box plots which effectively just set the bandwidth to maximum. So IMO they are strictly better.

I find violin plots suggest far smoother results than actually exist so you need to be careful with the amount of data.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#59

Post by SillyUsername »

quenix wrote: post #43
SillyUsername wrote: post #8

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…

Driving isn't a medium of communication, so this is an apples to oranges comparison. If a medium of communication is misunderstood and found to be misleading to your audience, it doesn't really matter whether it's an education problem or not. It ceases to be a good communication medium. The entire purpose of data viz as the author discussed is to convey ideas to other people. The author argues that people tend to mis…

As I've mentioned in other comments less succinctly, data hiding is sometimes useful of for drawing attention to other areas.

There are the better graphs the author mentioned for general purpose use, but the graph itself isn't at fault any more than using a bar chart with a poor scale (e.g omit 0-20) to do the same hiding.

Re: I've stopped using box plots (2021)

#60

Post by cjk2 »

ozyschmozy wrote: post #36
sigmoid10 wrote: post #12

>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…

> There are very real use cases for box plots, The author argues otherwise, can you give an example of a use case where box plots would be preferable to the alternatives the author suggests?

Comparing location, spread and skew of multiple batches.
Post reply on HN