plot_ViolinPlot: Create a violin plot

In Luminescence: Comprehensive Luminescence Dating Data Analysis

Create a violin plot

Description

Draws a kernel density plot in combination with a boxplot in its middle. The shape of the violin is constructed using a mirrored density curve. This plot is especially designed for cases where the individual errors are zero or too small to be visualised. The idea for this plot is based on the 'violin plot' in the ggplot2 package by Hadley Wickham and Winston Chang. The general idea for the violin plot seems to have been introduced by Hintze and Nelson (1998).

Usage

plot_ViolinPlot(
  data,
  boxplot = TRUE,
  rug = TRUE,
  summary = c("n", "median"),
  summary.pos = "sub",
  ...
)

Arguments

data	numeric or RLum.Results (required): input data for plotting. Alternatively a data.frame or a matrix can be provided, but only the first column will be considered by the function. Rows with NA values will be removed prior to plotting.
boxplot	logical (with default): enable/disable the boxplot.
rug	logical (with default): enable/disable the rug.
summary	character (with default): add statistic measures of centrality and dispersion to the plot. Can be one or more of several keywords. See details for available keywords.
summary.pos	numeric or character (with default): optional position keywords (cf. legend) for the statistical summary. Alternatively, the keyword "sub" may be specified to place the summary below the plot header. However, this latter option in only possible if mtext is not used.
...	further arguments and graphical parameters passed to plot.default, stats::density and boxplot. See details for further information.

Details

The function is passing several arguments to the functions plot, stats::density, graphics::boxplot:

Supported arguments are: xlim, main, xlab, ylab, col.violin, col.boxplot, mtext, cex, mtext

Valid summary keywords

'n', 'mean', 'median', 'sd.abs', 'sd.rel', 'se.abs', 'se.rel'. 'skewness', 'kurtosis'

Function version

0.1.4

How to cite

Kreutzer, S., 2026. plot_ViolinPlot(): Create a violin plot. Function version 0.1.4. In: Kreutzer, S., Burow, C., Dietze, M., Fuchs, M.C., Schmidt, C., Fischer, M., Friedrich, J., Mercier, N., Philippe, A., Riedesel, S., Autzen, M., Mittelstrass, D., Gray, H.J., Galharret, J., Colombo, M., Steinbuch, L., de Boer, A., Bluszcz, A., 2026. Luminescence: Comprehensive Luminescence Dating Data Analysis. R package version 1.3.1. https://r-lum.github.io/Luminescence/

Note

Although the code for this function was developed independently and just the idea for the plot was based on the 'ggplot2' plot type 'violin', it should be mentioned that, beyond this, at least another R package produces this kind of plot, namely 'vioplot' (see references for details).

Author(s)

Sebastian Kreutzer, F2.1 Geophysical Parametrisation/Regionalisation, LIAG - Institute for Applied Geophysics (Germany) , RLum Developer Team

References

Daniel Adler (2025). vioplot: violin plot. R package version 0.5.1 http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=vioplot

Hintze, J.L., Nelson, R.D. (1998). A Box Plot-Density Trace Synergism. The American Statistician 52, 181-184.

Wickham. H (2009). ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer New York.

See Also

stats::density, plot, boxplot, rug, calc_Statistics

Examples

## read example data set
data(ExampleData.DeValues, envir = environment())
ExampleData.DeValues <- convert_Second2Gray(ExampleData.DeValues$BT998,
                                            c(0.0438,0.0019))

## create plot straightforward
plot_ViolinPlot(data = ExampleData.DeValues)

Luminescence documentation built on Sept. 18, 2026, 9:07 a.m.