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A violin plot is a method of plotting numeric data. It is similar to a box plot, with the addition of a rotated kernel density plot on each side.
Violin plots are similar to box plots, except that they also show the probability density of the data at different values, usually smoothed by a kernel density estimator. Typically a violin plot will include all the data that is in a box plot: a marker for the median of the data; a box or marker indicating the interquartile range; and possibly all sample points, if the number of samples is not too high.
Violin plots are available as extensions to a number of software packages such as DataVisualization on CRAN and the md-plot package on PyPI.
A violin plot is more informative than a plain box plot. While a box plot only shows summary statistics such as mean/median and interquartile ranges, the violin plot shows the full distribution of the data. The difference is particularly useful when the data distribution is multimodal. In this case a violin plot shows the presence of different peaks, their position and relative amplitude.