Data Points added to Box Plots

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I think there is an opportunity to improve the box plot graphs by adding the data points from the series.

The layout is similar to that produced in JMP and I have found that the addition of the data points to the box plots very useful.

In the attached example I overlayed the box and whisker on top of the datapoints. For Series A, the label is set at X=0, Series B at x = 1, and Series C at x =2. I created a wave for the x values for each series with x = 0 + gnoise(.3), x = 1 + gnoise(.3).... and then plotted the series values versus the x value waves. The reason for the jitter is to show points that may overlap because they have the same value.

This adds another dimension to looking at the data. I think it would be an easy addition. Everything for the folks at Wavemetrics is easy.
Update: The ability to do this sort of thing is present in 6.2. From the what's new file:

Added /NCAT flag to AppendToGraph. Causes trace to be plotted normally on what otherwise is a category plot. x values are just category numbers but can be fractional. Category numbers start from zero. This can be used to overlay the original data points for a box plot. Here are examples:

Make/T/O catx={"cat0", "cat1", "cat2"}
Make/O caty= { 1, 3, 2}
Display caty vs catx
SetAxis/A/E=1 left

// Example 1: plot a function vertically overlaying a category
Make/O cat0over= 0.5*(sin(p/8)+1)
SetScale x, 0,3,cat0over
AppendToGraph/NCAT/VERT cat0over

// Example 2: simulate original data for a box plot
Make/N=10/O cat1over= gnoise(1)+1.5
SetScale/P x, 1.5, 1e-5, cat1over   // delta x can not be zero
AppendToGraph/NCAT cat1over
ModifyGraph mode(cat1over)=3,marker(cat1over)=19,rgb(cat1over)=(0,0,65535)

April 2, 2010 at 08:21 am - Permalink


Dear Dr. Hededus,

I am a very naive beginner of the use of Igor, and I found your fascinating post about Data points added to Box plots. I would really appreciate if you can teach me how to create this graph.
According to your post,

1. make a dot plot graph.
2. calculating the median, upper and lower quartiles
3. overlay the box plot on the dot plot.

I am completely in the dark how to do this, and appreciate if you give me any kinds of advice.

with best,

Takefumi

August 4, 2016 at 01:16 am - Permalink

Hi Dr. Hededus,

I found that the box plot with scatters would not work properly if the points numbers are different between waves. How can I figure this out?  

Yayong

November 5, 2020 at 10:19 pm - Permalink

Actually, box and violin plots were added to Igor in version 8, and version 9 (currently in beta testing) has the ability to set appearance on a box-by-box basis. If you can use Igor 8, it should work better than a procedure-based solution. And it easily supports different numbers of points in each box.

November 6, 2020 at 10:14 am - Permalink