y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

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gcabanac
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y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

Post by gcabanac »

Dear Jamovistas,

I was wondering if you would consider adding the labels to the y-axis of histograms (instead of the word ‘density’, as in the screenshot below)?
y-axis label
y-axis label
yaxis.png (18.53 KiB) Viewed 6097 times
Thanks for your tremendous work!

Best,

Guillaume
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Ravi
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Re: y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

Post by Ravi »

Hi Guillaume,

What kind of label would you expect on the y-axis? Histograms usually display the frequencies/density on the y-axis.

Cheers,
Ravi
gcabanac
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Re: y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

Post by gcabanac »

Hi Ravi,

I'm thinking about an option to display a scale of values, like the one on the x-axis. This would help figuring out the magnitude of the bars, wouldn't it?

Here is another example:
histogram with split
histogram with split
split.png (27.44 KiB) Viewed 6082 times
This result is *really* neat but I believe that it would be more informative with a scale on the y-axis (e.g., 2 ticks: one middle, one top). An “end tick” for the x-axis would be quite relevant, too (say 2050 even if the max value for x is 2017 -- it's a matter of helping the reader to see where the x-axis ends).

Cheers and kudos for the great job!

Guillaume
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Ravi
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Re: y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

Post by Ravi »

So I think the y-axis labels are useful when you have discrete values on the x-axis. But then you would use a bar graph instead of a histogram. The height of each "bar" in a histogram really depends on the bin-size. If you choose a bigger bin size, the "bar" would have a higher value than when you choose a smaller bin size as more cases would fall inside this bin. Therefore, the actual value of the bin doesn't really matter in a histogram. To me, it's more about checking out the shape of your data and because the y-axis values are not really meaningful in any way I omitted them from the plot.

The labels in your example show a grouping, so they are actually meaningful. What do you think?
gcabanac
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Re: y-axis labels in Descriptives/Histograms?

Post by gcabanac »

I see your point regarding the effect of bin-sizes on y-axis labels in histograms. However, I cannot help but finding informative the y-axes on the histograms featured here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram for instance.

Regarding my example with Type I and Type II, I believe readers might wonder about the magnitude of peaks: dozens, hundreds, thousands molecules...?

I like the way Jamovi displays the two Types, one below the other with the same y-axis scale, right? The colour palette is also great (I plotted another split with 15 elements and the result looks nice!). Thanks!
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