"Cloud is jittered"

This term is a technical description of the way data are plotted in a scatterplot.

In the scatterplots presented on this web site, the data are usually jittered randomly 1.5 percent (note that sometimes for clarity 3.0 percent is alternately used for very large datasets with many observations and a limited range on the variables in question). In datasets, it is quite likely that more than one data point would be plotted at the same point in the scatterplot because two or more individuals got identical (or close to identical) patterns of scores. In order to make it clear that more than one person has the same pattern of scores (which would not be apparent if the points were plotted on top of one another, a small amount of random "noise" is added to each point so that they will be plotted in slightly different places making it clear that there is more than one person with the score pattern.

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