1. A school in the Midwest is concerned with the recent drop in female students in its online education program. It decides to collect data from the admissions office on each applicant. The variables collected include gender, age, distance from school to home address measured in miles, income ($), acceptance (Yes or No), and attendance (Yes or No). The school is looking to explain the recent reduction in female attendance. Use this information to answer the following questions.
  1. Does this data represent a population or a sample? Explain.

Since the data collects information on each application this would be considered a population.

  1. For the following variables determine if they are categorical or quantitative. If the variable is categorical specify if it is nominal or ordinal. If the variable is quantitative specify if the variable is discrete or continuous.
Variable Type Class
Gender Categorical Nominal
Age Quantitative Discrete
Distance (Miles) Quantitative Continuous
Income Quantitative Continuous
Acceptance Categorical Either
Attendance Categorical Either
  1. A subset of individuals who completed a financial planning survey were asked to report the names of mutual funds in their portfolio, the total investment in each mutual fund ($), the mutual fund classification (money market, fixed income, equity, or other) and the Morningstar rank (1 to 5 Stars) . Use this information to answer the following questions.
  1. Does this data represent a population or a sample? Explain.

This data represents a sample from the population of people who completed the financial planning survey. It’s a subset of the overall population.

  1. For the following variables determine if they are categorical or quantitative. If the variable is categorical specify if it is nominal or ordinal. If the variable is quantitative specify if the variable is discrete or continuous.
Variable Class Type
Investment in Mutual Funds Quantitative Continuous
Mutual Fund Classification Categorical Nominal
Morningstar Rank Categorical Ordinal
  1. A representative sample of houses in Jacksonville, Illinois collected information on sales price ($), number of bedrooms, location categorized by school district, and a quality ranking (1-5). Use this information to answer the following questions.
  1. Does this data represent a population or a sample? Explain.

This data represents a sample of houses in Jacksonville. It does not include all the homes in the city.

  1. For the following variables determine if they are categorical or quantitative. If the variable is categorical specify if it is nominal or ordinal. If the variable is quantitative specify if the variable is discrete or continuous.
Variable Class Type
Sale Price Quantitative Continuous
Number of Bedrooms Quantitative Discrete
Location Categorical Nominal
Quality Ranking Categorical Ordinal
  1. The data set “J-Ville House” has 5 variables from a sample of houses in Jacksonville, IL. Use this data to answer the following questions.
  1. The ward variable identifies the location of the house in one of five unique wards in the city. Create a percent frequency table and bar plot for Ward and describe how the wards are distributed in the sample.
Ward Percent
ward1 10
ward2 24
ward3 6
ward4 39
ward5 21

Ward 4 has the largest percentage of houses in the sample followed distantly by ward 2. Ward 1 and ward 3 have the least percentage of houses in the sample with 10% and 6% respectively.

  1. The sale variable describes the sale price for each housing transaction. Create a histogram for the variable sale. Set the starting point at $1,000, ending value at $300,000, and group by bins of $50,000. Describe the symmetry of the distribution. Where are most of the house sales prices located?

The distribution of house prices is asymmetric showing right skew. There are significant number of houses with sales prices between $50,000 and $150,000.

  1. The data set “Phone Carrier” has two variables: Phone Carrier and Monthly Bill. The data set comes from a sample of cell phone customers. Use the data to answer the following questions.
  1. Create a percent frequency table and a bar plot for the variable Phone Carrier.
carrier Percent
AT&T 27
T-Mobile 14
US Cellular 14
Verizon 45

Verizon is clearly the more frequent service provider of the carriers followed by AT&T. T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular have a similar number of customers.

  1. Create a histogram for the variable Monthly Bill. Choose your own bin width. Characterize the distribution for this quantitative variable, how are monthly bills distributed?

The histogram is relatively symmetric and somewhat uniform. This can be interpreted as there are approximately equal numbers of phone bills in each bin and slightly smaller in the tails.