Login
📚 Online Statistics Education
Chapters ▾
1 Introduction2 Graphing Distributions3 Summarizing Distributions4 Describing Bivariate Data5 Probability6 Research Design7 Normal Distribution8 Advanced Graphs9 Sampling Distributions10 Estimation11 Logic of Hypothesis Testing12 Tests of Means13 Power14 Regression15 Analysis of Variance16 Transformations17 Chi Square18 Distribution Free Tests19 Effect Size
⇩ Download ▾
⇩ This section (Typst)

2.10 Dot Plots

Dot plots can be used to display various types of information. Figure 1 uses a dot plot to display the number of M & M's of each color found in a bag of M & M's. Each dot represents a single M & M. From the figure, you can see that there were 3 blue M & M's, 19 brown M & M's, etc.

Dot plot of the colors of 55 M&M candies in one bag: stacks of circles for Blue (3), Brown (19), Green (9), Red (3), Orange (14), and Yellow (7).
Figure 1. A dot plot showing the number of M & M's of various colors in a bag of M & M's.

The dot plot in Figure 2 shows the number of people playing various card games on the Yahoo website on a Wednesday. Unlike Figure 1, the location rather than the number of dots represents the frequency.

Dot plot of the number of people playing each card game on Wednesday, one dot per game on dotted leader lines, ordered from Poker (about 700) at the bottom to Spades (about 7,200) at the top.
Figure 2. A dot plot showing the number of people playing various card games on a Wednesday.

The dot plot in Figure 3 shows the number of people playing on a Sunday and on a Wednesday. This graph makes it easy to compare the popularity of the games separately for the two days, but does not make it easy to compare the popularity of a given game on the two days.

Two stacked dot plots of players per game, Sunday above and Wednesday below, each ordered from Poker (about 700) to Spades (about 7,000) — comparing the days requires looking back and forth between the panels.
Figure 3. A dot plot showing the number of people playing various card games on a Sunday and on a Wednesday.
Single dot plot of players per game with Sunday shown as filled circles and Wednesday as open circles on the same lines: Wednesday values sit slightly to the right (higher) for most games, such as Spades about 7,200 versus 6,700.
Figure 4. An alternate way of showing the number of people playing various card games on a Sunday and on a Wednesday.

The dot plot in Figure 4 makes it easy to compare the days of the week for specific games while still portraying differences among games.

Adapted from Online Statistics Education: A Multimedia Course of Study (onlinestatbook.com), Project Leader: David M. Lane, Rice University. Developed with NSF support. The original work is in the public domain; it is cited here at the authors' request. Changes were made: reformatted as an accessible XYZ web edition with native MathML. License: Public-Domain.