chart
raincloud plot
Combination of a density, a box and the raw points.
graphique en nuage de pluie
Combinaison d'une densité, d'une boîte et des points bruts.
Classification
- chart
- boxes and densities › density shapes
- distribution
- the name evokes: nature
Channels
position on common scale; main: values, quartiles
position on unaligned scale; secondary: density (half violin)
spatial region; main: group
color hue; secondary: group
Attestation
- French term: Common usage, not attested by a source
- English definition: Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu
Scientific literature
OpenAlex: 72 papers since 2019, 83% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Social Sciences
Seminal references
R packages
- R
ggdist::stat_slab(); GitHub 882 stars; last commit 2025-10; paper (175 citations) Demi-violon (stat_slab) et points (stat_dots) côte à côte. - R
ggrain::geom_rain(); GitHub 98 stars; last commit 2026-06; paper (502 citations) DOI de la méthode (raincloud plots, Allen et al. 2021), cité par le paquet.
R code of the ggplot2 example
set.seed(20261014)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggdist)
library(palmerpenguins)
p <- ggplot(penguins, aes(x = bill_depth_mm, y = species, colour = species, fill = species)) +
stat_slab(position = position_nudge(y = 0.12), scale = 0.55, alpha = 0.4, na.rm = TRUE) +
geom_boxplot(width = 0.1, outlier.shape = NA, fill = NA, linewidth = 0.4, na.rm = TRUE) +
geom_jitter(aes(y = as.numeric(species) - 0.2), height = 0.06, width = 0,
size = 0.8, alpha = 0.5, na.rm = TRUE) +
scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
labs(title = "Gentoo penguins have the shallowest bills",
subtitle = "Density above, box in the middle, one point per penguin below",
x = "Bill depth (mm)", y = NULL,
caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "x", break_not_zero = "x") +
theme(legend.position = "none")Sources (4)
7 occurrences in the corpus
Cite this entry
Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/raincloud-plot.html
ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. raincloud plot. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/raincloud-plot.html
BibTeX
@incollection{taudiere2026-raincloud-plot,
author = {Taudière, Adrien},
title = {raincloud plot},
booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {IdEst},
url = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/raincloud-plot.html},
note = {CC0 1.0}
}Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-06. Images last changed on 2026-11-02. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.