<insert obligatory bemoan>
First, I'm curious. Is there any reason why the leaves are squished together with no delimeters?
Second, the crucial point that seems to be missing from the stem help page (and one I can't glean without going through the code) is how bins are determined. If that can be explained to the reader, the explanation of scale follows naturally.
Third, feel free to incorporate the following text into the help page as necessary; I've tried to make it helpful (but clarity is obviously in the eye of the beholder).
stem produces a stem-and-leaf plot of the elements in x. Each element is placed in a bin ranging [low, high); that is, if y is an element, it is placed in the bin iff low <= element < high. The size of the bin is determined by... .
The stem that is listed for the bin is not necessarily the stem of all (or any) of the leaves in the bin; the true stems must be equal to or higher than the listed stems, but they will all be smaller than the lowerst stem of the next highest bin. (Observe how the bin for the stem 4 changes with the two examples below.)
Leaves are ordered within a bin. If leaves seem unordered (e.g., 4 | 0306), then the scale of the plot may be too compressed: that bin contains leaves from multiple different stems. The parameter scale can be used to expand the scale of the plot.
Arguments
x a numeric vector.
scale This controls the number of bins. A value of scale=2 will cause the plot to be twice as long as the default by using roughly twice as many bins.
width The desired width of the plot, in characters.
atom a tolerance [This needs better text.]
Examples stem(c(30, 32, 50, 52, 60, 62, 70, 72, 80, 82)) stem(c(30, 32, 50, 52, 60, 62, 70, 72, 80, 82), scale=2)
----Original Message Follows---- From: Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Ramzi Nahhas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED], <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [R] stem() bug? Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:17:08 +0100 (BST)
It is as intended. The answer is correct but your interpretation of it is not, and the help page is woefully lacking.
Note that the bins in your problem are [20, 40), [40, 60), [60, 80) and [80, 100) and they are correctly labelled. In such bins e.g. 20 and 30 are both represented in the same way.
Does stem(seq(30, 92, 5)) help you see the pattern?
Please would one of those bemoaning R's documentation recently submit to R-bugs an enhanced help page for stem?
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Ramzi Nahhas wrote:
>
> Is the following a bug with stem() or is there something else that I am
> missing? I ran stem() on the vector x below and got stem(x-10) instead of
> stem(x). If I subtract 1 from x, I get a correct answer. If I add 1 to x, I
> still get a wrong answer. If I add 10 to x, I get a correct answer. I'm not
> sure what to make of this, other than to think it is a bug.
>
> Can anyone tell me if this is a bug?
>
> I am running R 1.9.1 on Windows XP (SP2).
>
> Sincerely,
> Ramzi Nahhas
>
> PS In your reply, please copy me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] as I am not
> subscribed to this list. Thank you.
>
> > x
> [1] 30 70 90 75 70 95 75 70 60 55
> > stem(x)
>
> The decimal point is 1 digit(s) to the right of the |
>
> 2 | 0
> 4 | 5
> 6 | 000055
> 8 | 05
>
> > stem(x-1)
>
> The decimal point is 1 digit(s) to the right of the |
>
> 2 | 9
> 4 | 49
> 6 | 99944
> 8 | 94
>
> > stem(x+1)
>
> The decimal point is 1 digit(s) to the right of the |
>
> 2 | 1
> 4 | 6
> 6 | 111166
> 8 | 16
>
> > stem(x+10)
>
> The decimal point is 1 digit(s) to the right of the |
>
> 4 | 0
> 6 | 50
> 8 | 00055
> 10 | 05
>
> ---
>
>
>
>
>
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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