chart
quantile dot plot
Probability distribution cut into a fixed number of quantiles each drawn as a dot.
Classification
- chart
- points and bubbles › dot strips
- distribution
Channels
position on common scale; main: quantile
length; secondary: probability (height of the stacks)
spatial region; secondary: quantile
Attestation
- English definition: Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization, O'Reilly, 2019
Scientific literature
OpenAlex: 14 papers since 2020, 50% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science
Seminal references
R packages
- R
ggdist::stat_dots(); GitHub 882 stars; last commit 2025-10; paper (175 citations)
R code of the ggplot2 example
library(ggplot2)
library(ggdist)
library(HistData)
## Speed of light minus 299 000 km/s; today's value in air is 734.5 (HistData).
p <- ggplot(Michelson, aes(x = velocity)) +
stat_dots(quantiles = 20, scale = 0.7, fill = "#9b2367", colour = NA) +
geom_vline(xintercept = 734.5, colour = "#535353", linewidth = 0.4, linetype = "dashed") +
annotate("text", x = 741, y = 0.9, label = "Today's value, in air", hjust = 0, size = 3.2, colour = "#535353") +
scale_x_continuous(labels = \(x) lex_number(299000 + x), breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
scale_y_continuous(NULL, breaks = NULL) +
labs(title = "Michelson's next measurement would likely be too high",
subtitle = "100 measurements from 1879 as 20 quantiles; each dot is a 1-in-20 chance",
x = "Speed of light (km/s)",
caption = "Data: Michelson 1882, via the HistData R package") +
theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "x", break_not_zero = "x")Sources (2)
1 occurrence in the corpus
Cite this entry
Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/quantile-dot-plot.html
ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. quantile dot plot. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/quantile-dot-plot.html
BibTeX
@incollection{taudiere2026-quantile-dot-plot,
author = {Taudière, Adrien},
title = {quantile dot plot},
booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {IdEst},
url = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/quantile-dot-plot.html},
note = {CC0 1.0}
}Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-10-22. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.