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From: Ethan A Merritt <sfeam@users.sourceforge.net>
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot
Subject: Re: help, dotplot and horizontal boxplot
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:02:30 -0800
Organization: gnuplot development
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Tom wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I tried to plot dotplot in gnuplot but unable to find  a way
> to do it. is there a way to do dotplot as shown below
> in gnuplot
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_plot_(statistics)?

Note that the use of dots in the specific examples on that URL
is a historical artifact.  When preparing such a plot by hand
it is convenient to draw a dot for each new point as it is 
tallied, resulting in a stack of dots at each x coordinate rather
than a box or line of equivalent height. If the tally is done
by computer then it is more common to simply draw a vertical bar.

The gnuplot equivalent command filters the input data using
either "smooth frequency" or "smooth kdensity".

gnuplot> help smooth frequency

 The `frequency` option makes the data monotonic in x; points with the same
 x-value are replaced by a single point having the summed y-values.
 To plot a histogram of the number of data values in equal size bins,
 set the y-value to 1.0 so that the sum is a count of occurances in that bin:
 Example:
      binwidth = <something>  # set width of x values in each bin
      bin(val) = binwidth * floor(val/binwidth)
      plot "datafile" using (bin(column(1))):(1.0) smooth frequency
 See also
      http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/smooth.html

If you have in mind a more complex plot in which information is
attached to individual dots in the "dot plot" (color? size?), 
I'd be interested in seeing an real world example of use.
I can't at the moment think how you would do that in gnuplot,
but it seems like a reasonable feature request.

	Ethan 

 
> Another question is about boxplot.
> The boxplot in gnuplot displays the box vertically.
> Can a box be displayed horizontally as shown below
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boxplot_vs_PDF.svg
> ?

No.