In TomKellyGenetics/vioplot: Violin Plot

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:

Greater flexibility for plotting variation than boxplots
More familiarity to boxplot users than density plots
Easier to directly compare data types than existing plots

As shown below for the iris dataset, violin plots show distribution information that the boxplot is unable to.

General Set up

library("vioplot")

We set up the data with two categories (Sepal Width) as follows:

data(iris)
summary(iris$Sepal.Width)
table(iris$Sepal.Width > mean(iris$Sepal.Width))
iris_large <- iris[iris$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:

boxplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris, col="grey")

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))
}

Violin Plots

First we plot Sepal Length on its own:

vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris)

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))
}

An indirect comparison can be achieved with par:

{
  par(mfrow=c(1,2))
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))
}

Split Violin Plots

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

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)))
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue", "palevioletred"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Width")

Median

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.

Enchanced annotation demonstration.

Here we add outliers and show annotation features.

# add outliers to demo data
iris2 <- iris
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(7, 1, 0, 0, "setosa"))
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(1, 10, 0, 0, "setosa"))
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(9, 2, 0, 0, "versicolor"))
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(2, 12, 0, 0, "versicolor"))
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(10, 1, 0, 0, "virginica"))
iris2 <- rbind(iris2, c(12, 7, 0, 0, "virginica"))
iris2$Species <- factor(iris2$Species)
iris2$Sepal.Length <- as.numeric(iris2$Sepal.Length)
iris2$Sepal.Width <- as.numeric(iris2$Sepal.Width)
table(iris2$Species)

Annotation on split violins are shown here. See the main violin plot vignette for details on these parameters.

data(iris)
summary(iris2$Sepal.Width)
table(iris2$Sepal.Width > mean(iris2$Sepal.Width))
iris_large <- iris2[iris2$Sepal.Width > mean(iris2$Sepal.Width), ]
iris_small <- iris2[iris2$Sepal.Width <= mean(iris2$Sepal.Width), ]

attach(iris_large)
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_large, plotCentre = "line", side = "right", col=c("lightgreen", "lightblue", "palevioletred"), ylim = c(min(iris2$Sepal.Length) * 0.9, max(iris2$Sepal.Length) * 1.1),
        names=c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica"))
Sepal.medians <- sapply(unique(Species), function(sp) median(iris_large$Sepal.Length[Species == sp]))
# highlights medians
points(x = c(1:length(Sepal.medians)), y = Sepal.medians, pch = 21, cex = 1.25, lwd = 2,
       col = "white", bg = c("forestgreen", "lightblue4", "palevioletred4"))
# plots outliers above 2 SD
add_outliers(unlist(iris_large$Sepal.Length), iris2$Species, cutoff = 2,
             col = c("palegreen3", "lightblue3", "palevioletred3"), bars = "grey85", lwd = 2,
             fill = "grey85")
legend("bottomright", legend=c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica"),
       fill=c("palegreen3", "lightblue3", "palevioletred3"), cex = 0.6)
add_labels(unlist(iris2$Sepal.Length), iris2$Species, height = 0.5, cex = 0.8)

attach(iris_small)
vioplot(Sepal.Length~Species, data=iris_small, plotCentre = "line", side = "left", add = T, col=c("palegreen1", "lightblue1", "palevioletred1"), ylim = c(min(Sepal.Length) * 0.9, max(Sepal.Length) * 1.1),
        names=c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica"))


Sepal.medians <- sapply(unique(Species), function(sp) median(iris_small$Sepal.Length[Species == sp]))
# highlights medians
points(x = c(1:length(Sepal.medians)), y = Sepal.medians, pch = 21, cex = 1.25, lwd = 2,
       col = "white", bg = c("forestgreen", "lightblue4", "palevioletred4"))
# plots outliers above 2 SD
add_outliers(unlist(iris2$Sepal.Length), iris2$Species, cutoff = 2,
             col = c("palegreen3", "lightblue3", "palevioletred3"), bars = "grey85", lwd = 2,
             fill = "grey50")
legend("bottomright", legend=c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica"),
       fill=c("lightgreen", "lightblue", "palevioletred"), cex = 0.6)
add_labels(unlist(iris2$Sepal.Length), iris2$Species, height = 0.5, cex = 0.8)

# add legend and titles
legend("topleft", fill = c("lightblue2", "lightblue3"), legend = c("small", "large"), title = "Sepal Width")
title(xlab = "Species", ylab = "Sepal Length")