barplotdata visualizationdescriptive statisticsmeanstandard deviation
I am trying to visualize an appropriate plot for the observations in this table of means and standard deviations of recall scores:
\begin{array} {c|c c|c c|}
& \text{Control} & & \text{Experimental} & \\
& \text{Mean} & \text{SD} &\text{Mean} &\text{SD} \\
\hline
\text{Recall} & 37 & 8 & 21 & 6 \\
\hline
\end{array}
What is is the best way to do that? Is bar chart a good way to do it? How can I illustrate the standard deviation in that case?
No, there isn't. In essence, having the columns-wise means is equivalent to having the sums along the columns. With that, you cannot get the sums along the rows.
In general, to recover the sum along the rows you'll need to recover the full matrix. Knowing the other sum (in your example, $(5.25 2.75 3.5)$ ) is not enough. This can be seen in matrix form. Essentially, you have $A U = M$ where A is the data matrix, U is a row column with ones (or 1/N) and M is the sums or means along the colums or rows. If you could augment U by adding other operations, so that U is square, you could invert U and recover A. For example, if you had not only the sum of the four rows, but the sum of the first three rows, and the first two rows ... etc... you'd have 4 vector of 3 components, and then you could recover your matrix.
Why not a line plot? A line plot seems pretty fitting if you'd like to show general trends in mean and SD provided individual specie is not the focal point.
Anyway, here is an alternative, which strictly speaking is still a line plot but time is not one of the axes. It is also good for discussing individual species. x-axis is your variable 1 (I guessed that's mean), y-axis is the variable 2 (SD).
And yes, heat map maybe too much, but I think it's worth a try to show 3D kernel density if you can provide the actual data as well. Codes are taken from this thread.
Another possibility is to make three plots:
Best Answer
Standard deviation on bar graphs can be illustrated by including error bars in them.
The visualization(source) below is an example of such visualization:
From a discussion in the comments below, having only the error whiskers instead of the error bars setup seems a better way to visualize such data. So, the graph can look somewhat like this: