Boxplots and quartile plots for grouped and periodic angular data

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel visualization methods for grouped and periodic angular data, including concentric circular boxplots, circular quartile plots, and 3D toroidal displays, supported by perceptual studies and applied to diverse real-world datasets.

Contribution

It presents new visualization techniques tailored for angular data, addressing perceptual challenges and extending to large groups and periodic distributions with practical implementations.

Findings

Concentric circular boxplots effectively display group angular distributions.

Scaled boxwidths improve perception in visualizations.

Toroidal plots capture complex periodic angular patterns.

Abstract

Angular observations, or observations lying on the unit circle, arise in many disciplines and require special care in their description, analysis, interpretation and visualization. We provide methods to construct concentric circular boxplot displays of distributions of groups of angular data. The use of concentric boxplots brings challenges of visual perception, so we set the boxwidths to be inversely proportional to the square root of their distance from the centre. A perception survey supports this scaled boxwidth choice. For a large number of groups, we propose circular quartile plots. A three-dimensional toroidal display is also implemented for periodic angular distributions. We illustrate our methods on datasets in (1) psychology, to display motor resonance under different conditions, (2) genomics, to understand the distribution of peak phases for ancillary clock genes, and (3) meteorology and wind turbine power generation, to study the changing and periodic distribution of wind direction over the course of a year.