Fundamentals of Statistics contains material of various lectures and courses of H. Lohninger on statistics, data analysis and chemometrics......click here for more.

Home General Processing Steps Visualization Dot Plots
See also: Histogram 

Dot Plot

Dot plots are drawn by placing a symbol for each observation of a variable X at the corresponding position along a number line (Fig. A). However, this approach exhibits the drawback that equal observations are plotted on top of each other, thus creating a wrong impression of the distribution of the observations (especially when many observations are to be displayed).

For that reason this kind of plot is most often drawn as a stacked dot plot where equal observations are displayed as a stack (Fig. B).

If we replace the dot symbols by lines of a specific length we obtain line diagrams (Fig. C) which allow to draw more observations than stacked dot plots. However, line diagram must not be mixed up with histograms.


Home General Processing Steps Visualization Dot Plots