(This article was first published on Ecology in silico, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) Violin plots are useful for comparing distributions. When data are grouped by a factor with two levels (e.g. males and females), you can split the violins in half to see the difference between groups. Consider a 2 x 2 factorial experiment: treatments A and B are crossed with groups 1 and 2, with N=1000. 1