Violinboxplot and enhanced radar plot as components of effective graphical dashboards: An educational example of sports analytics

Abstract

A statistical graph can offer an alternative compelling approach to statistical thinking that focuses on important concepts rather than procedural formulas. Nowadays, visualizing multidimensional/multivariate data is essential but can also be challenging. In sport analytics, the exploration and descriptive analysis of data using visualization techniques has increased in recent years to, for example, describe possible patterns and uncertainty of player performance. These visualization techniques have been used so far with different purposes by various professionals in the sport industry, such as managers, coaches, scouters, technical staff, journalists, and researchers. The abuse of graphs, such as the radar plot, and their frequent misinterpretation in the world of sports and possible implications for coaching decisions has led us to create more informative and accurate visualizations. Here, we propose new, more educational visualizations we have termed violinboxplots and enhanced radar plot for their use in the sports analytics and other fields. These allow us to visualize, besides distribution and statistical summaries, the extreme data values that can be fundamental in performance studies and allow us to benchmark.