Stem and Leaf Plot — The Tree of Visualization.

A Stem and Leaf Plot is a frequency diagram in which raw data is split into two parts(stem and leaf) and then displayed. It is used to display quantitative data.

A stem and Leaf plot almost resembles an inverted Histogram with an added advantage of displaying all the data points in the Dataset.

• Right-Skewed or Positive skew resembles a Right Foot.
• Left-Skewed or Negative skew resembles a Left Foot.

The below diagram represents the raw data containing the values [21,22,22,25,28,30,33,37,37,51,54,54,55,59] and it is split into stem(containing the Ten’s value) and leaf(containing the One’s value).

The code for Displaying the Stem and Leaf Plot for the above Dataset.

The 21 and 59 values which are represented in red color shows the Minimum and Maximum value of the Dataset. The orange color shows where the median lies in the Dataset.

ADVANTAGES:

• By displaying individual values, it makes easier to find patterns.(We can clearly see that there is a even number sequence in the 80–89 range)

• Efficient way for describing small and medium datasets.
• Comparing two different sets of data is easier.(Test Scores and ODI Scores of Sachin Tendulkar)

DISADVANTAGE:

• It doesn’t give any good insight and it is not preferred for a large dataset as the plot becomes clumsy with more numbers.(Sachin’s Strike Rate for last 12 ODI’s).