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.
In my experience of sharing violin plots with people who are unfamiliar with them, it's not intuitive that the curve represents the distribution. Even with the scatter plot over/underlaid.
But that's okay, I don't mind explaining it and then the graph is easier to interpret imo.
You're right. I guess that's not the author's mistake then. His mistake is assuming "the whisker is small, therefore it has a small number of datapoints".
That's not his mistake. He knows this, but repeatedly failed to convey this to others.
That's like the entire point of the post: they're hard to teach to others (they're unintuitive) and there are better (more intuitive) alternatives.
I dunno if I agree, but it's ironic that this thread started with a poster complaining about the author's bad intuition, while apparently managing to not have a good grasp of box plots themselves.
What are you talking about? I have a perfect grasp of these things. As I said, half is in the shape area. You must've missed that.
Also, that IS his mistake, it's literally the first thing in the post. And this stuff isn't hard or hard to teach _at all_ has long as you're at least 5.
You need to develop the intuition in the first place to read box-plots. The author argues that there are other plots where you don't require intuition.
The "this looks like a small quantity" comparison is wrong, because it's pointing to the lowest quartile, which has a cutoff which looks like 0 to <8 or so. While the histogram count compared to is using a bit of 0 to <10 - so it's not comparing the same counts, unfortunately. Having the historgram also count quartiles (or bins that add up evenly to quartiles) would drive that point home a lot better.
Apart from that quibble, it's a point very well taken.
