Stem-and-Leaf Diagram

A stem-and-leaf diagram, also called a stem-and-leaf plot, is a diagram that quickly summarizes data while maintaining the individual data points. In such a diagram, the "stem" is a column of the unique elements of data after removing the last digit. The final digits ("leaves") of each column are then placed in a row next to the appropriate column and sorted in numerical order. This diagram was invented by John Tukey.

Stem-and-leaf diagrams are implemented as StemLeafPlot[data] in the Wolfram Language package StatisticalPlots` , as illustrated above for the data set (147, 117, 101, 149, 145, 105, 93, 94, 114, 104, 136, 140, 121, 145, 120, 142, 98, 135, 135, 132). StemLeafPlot can also construct side-by-side stem and leaf plots from two data sets, as illustrated for the above right plot, which corresponds to splitting the data into two pieces.

REFERENCES:

Gonick, L. and Smith, W. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. New York: Harper Perennial, pp. 12 and 18, 1993.

Tukey, J. W. Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 7-16, 1977.