Comparable Immune Alterations and Inflammatory Signatures in ME/CFS and Long COVID, 2025, Petrov et al

[forestglip]

Histograms start at the left and stack towards the right, like using «align left» in a text document. The new plot in that paper uses the equivalent of «centre text».

Oh okay, I thought you were mainly aiming for the binning aspect, not necessarily keeping it asymmetrical like a standard histogram.

 

[Utsikt]

Oh okay, I thought you were mainly aiming for the binning aspect, not necessarily keeping it asymmetrical like a standard histogram.

I should have been clearer that it’s to aid the visual inspection of the data.

And at some point you’d have to address the question of significant digits. Is it really that important to see the difference between 32.3 and 32 on a scale between 0 and 50? I’d argue it’s not worth the cost of making it more difficult to judge the distribution of the values.

 

[ryanc97]

Histograms are almost completely useless in this situation. We need to see the individual data points. I am not particularly impressed by the differences. Most values are within the normal range. Some of the spreads are truncated but artefacts can do that. Higher NK values in normals might reflect more physical activity recently or something.

Well, now you know that you can set the bin width to 1.... for comparing overlapping distributions the histogram is the best visual tool.

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

Well, now you know that you can set the bin width to 1

The example you post below doesn't look like it set the bin width to 1 though. And if you have more than 2 groups, it becomes harder to see if they are all overlapping.