Geometries of Univariate Distributions

Plotting univariate data is a starting point to understanding data visualization as graphical analysis. We’ll use the distribution of univariate data to introduce the four most common plotting geometries – points, lines, bars and boxes.

In this section we will focus on a simple data set: various measurements of mammalian animals, including total sleep time (hours) and eating habits (carnivore, omnivore, insectivore or herbivore). The total sleep times are as follows:.

For univariate data, we are primarily interested in its distribution, i.e. What does the data look like?