Speaking Stata: Turning over a new leaf
Nicholas J. Cox
Department of Geography
Durham University
Durham City, UK
[email protected]
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Abstract. Stem-and-leaf displays have been widely taught since John W. Tukey
publicized them energetically in the 1970s. They remain useful for many
distributions of small or modest size, especially for showing fine structure
such as digit preference. Stata’s implementation stem produces typed
text displays and has some inevitable limitations, especially for comparison
of two or more displays. One can re-create stem-and-leaf displays with a
few basic Stata commands as scatterplots of stem variable versus position on
line with leaves shown as marker labels. Comparison of displays then becomes
easy and natural using scatter, by(). Back-to-back presentation of
paired displays is also possible. I discuss variants on standard
stem-and-leaf displays in which each distinct value is a stem, each distinct
value is its own leaf, or axes are swapped. The problem shows how one can,
with a few lines of Stata, often produce standard graph forms from first
principles, allowing in turn new variants. I also present a new program,
stemplot, as a convenience tool.
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Nicholas J. Cox
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stemplot, stem-and-leaf, graphics, distributions, digit preference
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