lei-zhang / nicegroupplot

niceGroupPlot

Background

This plotting function is useful for people who tend to run experiments with two groups of participants and multiple conditions. I was going to call it GroupByConditionPlot, but niceGroupPlot has a better ring to it. In reality, it is just a function to implement a split violin plot using violinPlot.m from the great Ann Urai (https://anneurai.net/2016/06/13/prettier-plots-in-matlab/), and also notBoxPlot.m by the ever brilliant Rob Campbell (https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/26508-notboxplot). Split violin plot smooths a histogram of the data to show the distrubution of the datapoints. notBoxPlot plots the mean, 95% SEM and SD to show summary statistics. You may also choose to scatter the raw data on top of this.

Both Ann and Rob selflessly shared their plotting code for others to use and edit; I just mashed it together into a function with inputs for all the things I usually want to change or add to a plot when running clinical studies with two groups. Feel free to use, take, edit and make your own!

I advise checking out plotting_examples.m first for a tutorial on how the function works.