The Sectioned Density Plot

Effective graphical presentation efficiently summarizes, exposes, and communicates patterns in data. Here we describe a new plot, the sectioned density plot, that compares full distributions across multiple groups. We designed the sectioned density plot to exploit the visual system's natural ability to interpret occlusion and intensity variation as changes in depth. By incorporating depth into the graphical display, we were able to combine the ability of the boxplot to display trends in variance and central tendency with the ability of a histogram/kernel density plot to present distribution shape.