Seeing the Forest with the Stems-and-Leaves

A picture is worth a thousand words. This paper shows how to use pictures called stem-and-leaf diagrams to display important loss patterns that might otherwise remain hidden in development triangles. These diagrams have the added benefit of appealing to the “big picture” folks in your audience. So that important patterns are always observed in these diagrams, this paper also presents some good practice suggestions that are used to review and evaluate another type of diagram, electrocardiograms (ECG) tracings.

Keywords: Reserving, development triangles, stem-and-leaf, ECG, EKG