##Violin Plots
Therefore violin plots are a powerful tool to assist researchers to visualise data, particularly in the quality checking and exploratory parts of an analysis. Violin plots have many benefits:
As shown below for the iris dataset, violin plots show distribution information that the boxplot is unable to.
###General Set up
We set up the data with two categories (Sepal Width) as follows:
## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
## 2.000 2.800 3.000 3.057 3.300 4.400##
## FALSE TRUE
## 83 67iris_large <- iris[iris$Sepal.Width > mean(iris$Sepal.Width), ]
iris_small <- iris[iris$Sepal.Width <= mean(iris$Sepal.Width), ]###Boxplots
First we plot Sepal Length on its own:
An indirect comparison can be achieved with par:
{
par(mfrow=c(2,1))
boxplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue")
boxplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred")
par(mfrow=c(1,1))
}
First we plot Sepal Length on its own:
An indirect comparison can be achieved with par:
{
par(mfrow=c(2,1))
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "line")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "line")
par(mfrow=c(1,1))
}
A more direct comparision can be made with the side argument and add = TRUE on the second plot:
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "line", side = "right")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "line", side = "left", add = T)
title(xlab = "Species", ylab = "Sepal Length")
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Sepal Width")
Custom axes labels are supported for split violin plots. However, you must use these arguments on the first call of vioplot.
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "line", side = "right", xlab = "Iris species", ylab = "Length", main = "Sepals", names=paste("Iris", levels(iris$Species)))
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "line", side = "left", add = T)
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Width")
Note that this is disabled for the second vioplot call to avoid overlaying labels.
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "line", side = "right")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "line", side = "left", add = T, xlab = "Iris species", ylab = "Length", main = "Sepals", names=paste("Iris", levels(iris$Species)))## Warning in vioplot.formula(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris_small, col = "lightblue", : Warning: names can only be changed on first call of vioplot (when add = FALSE)## Warning in vioplot.formula(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris_small, col = "lightblue", : Warning: x-axis labels can only be changed on first call of vioplot (when add = FALSE)## Warning in vioplot.formula(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris_small, col = "lightblue", : Warning: y-axis labels can only be changed on first call of vioplot (when add = FALSE)## Warning in vioplot.default(x, ...): Warning: names can only be changed on first call of vioplot (when add = FALSE)## Warning in vioplot.default(x, ...): Warning: main title can only be changed on first call of vioplot (when add = FALSE)
The line median option is more suitable for side by side comparisions but the point option is still available also:
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "point", side = "right", pchMed = 21, colMed = "palevioletred4", colMed2 = "palevioletred2")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "point", side = "left", pchMed = 21, colMed = "lightblue4", colMed2 = "lightblue2", add = T)
title(xlab = "Species", ylab = "Sepal Length")
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Sepal Width")
It may be necessary to include a points command to fix the median being overwritten by the following plots:
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "point", side = "right", pchMed = 21, colMed = "palevioletred4", colMed2 = "palevioletred2")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "point", side = "left", pchMed = 21, colMed = "lightblue4", colMed2 = "lightblue2", add = T)
points(1:length(levels(iris$Species)), as.numeric(sapply(levels(iris$Species), function(species) median(iris_large[grep(species, iris_large$Species),]$Sepal.Length))), pch = 21, col = "palevioletred4", bg = "palevioletred2")
title(xlab = "Species", ylab = "Sepal Length")
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Sepal Width")
Similarly points could be added where a line has been used previously:
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, col = "palevioletred", plotCentre = "line", side = "right", pchMed = 21, colMed = "palevioletred4", colMed2 = "palevioletred2")
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, col = "lightblue", plotCentre = "line", side = "left", pchMed = 21, colMed = "lightblue4", colMed2 = "lightblue2", add = T)
points(1:length(levels(iris$Species)), as.numeric(sapply(levels(iris$Species), function(species) median(iris_large[grep(species, iris_large$Species),]$Sepal.Length))), pch = 21, col = "palevioletred4", bg = "palevioletred2")
points(1:length(levels(iris$Species)), as.numeric(sapply(levels(iris$Species), function(species) median(iris_small[grep(species, iris_small$Species),]$Sepal.Length))), pch = 21, col = "lightblue4", bg = "lightblue2")
title(xlab = "Species", ylab = "Sepal Length")
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Sepal Width")
Here it is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive to interpret categorical differences in mean and variation in a continuous variable.
These extensions to vioplot here are based on those provided here:
These have previously been discussed on the following sites: