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armollica

Visualizing Distributions

A few ways to visualize 1D distributions.

Swarm and pile plots show all the data points but can't be used when there are a lot of data points. Histograms and boxplots work for any number of data points since they are visualizing summary statistics. Histograms provide more information than a boxplot. Boxplots fit in small spaces, making them nice for comparing many distributions side-by-side.

Other chart types for 1D distributions: violin plot, kernel density, empirical CDF.

The d3.forceChart() plugin is used for the swarm and pile plots; d3.layout.histogram() for the histogram; d3.scale.quantile() for the quartile summary statistics used in the boxplot.