September 9th, 2010 | No Comments

If we have done a experiment in order to apply a significance test like a ANOVA to our measured data, we are interested in presenting our statistical data in a familiar way.
Let us assume we have the following mean and standard deviation data for five different conditions:

"A"     0.66257     0.41854
"B"     0.70842     0.38418
"C"     0.66733     0.44059
"D"     0.45375     0.52384
"E"     0.43900     0.53116

The results for the last two conditions are significant different from the first ones. Using this data we want to create a plot that looks like the one in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Plot the mean and variance of the given data (code to produce this figure)

To achieve the plot in Fig. 1 we have to define two different color styles for the color of the errorbars and the color of the boxes. Also, we need the fill style (solid) for the boxes and the gray line around the boxes which is given by the border rgb 'grey30' option to the set style fill command. For the line color we choose the same color as for the errorbars:

set style line 1 lc rgb 'grey30' ps 0 lt 1 lw 2
set style line 2 lc rgb 'grey70' lt 1 lw 2
set style fill solid 1.0 border rgb 'grey30'

For the first line style which is used to plot the errorbars also a point size of 0 is specified in order to plot only the errorbars and no points on top of the boxes.

The *-dots above the two last conditions to indicate their significant difference are just added as labels. The border of the graph on the top and right side is removed by set border 3 (see here for an explanation of the number codes) and by using the nomirror option for the tics. The xtics are not visible, because we set them to scale 0.

set label '*' at 3,0.8 center
set label '*' at 4,0.8 center
set border 3
set xtics nomirror scale 0
set ytics nomirror out scale 0.75 0.5

Then we plot first the errorbars in order to overlay the boxes on it, so only the top half of the errorbars will be visible. Note that we have standard deviation data in the data file, therefore we have to use their squares in order to get the variance. As xtic labels we use the first row in the data file by appending xtic(1):

plot 'simple_statistics.dat' u 0:2:($3**2) w yerrorbars ls 1, \
     ''                      u 0:2:(0.7):xtic(1) w boxes ls 2