A stem-and-leaf plot(orstemplot), in statistics, is a device for presenting quantitative data in a graphical format, similar to a histogram, to assist in visualizing the shape of a distribution. They evolved from Arthur Bowley's work in the early 1900s, and are useful tools in exploratory data analysis.
Unlike histograms, stemplots retain the original data to at leasttwo significant digits, and put the data in order, thereby easing themove to order-based inference and non-parametric statistics.
A basic stemplot contains two columns separated by a vertical line. The left column contains thestemsand the right column contains theleaves.