Environmental Data Analysis EESC BC 3017

Homework 6 - due Th 11/5

Significance tests

1.) (8p) Your employee has performed a job for you and estimates the cost to be $7320. You doubt this estimate and decide to perform a hypothesis test. From a list of actual costs of jobs similar to the job your employee estimated, you randomly select 49 to test the estimate. The mean and standard deviation of the sample are $7500 and $700, respectively. Again, formulate null and alternate hypotheses. Is the difference of $180 significant at the 95% level?

2.) (8p) In order to determine if students make a systematic error when counting particles on a scotch tape, artificial samples were prepared by putting exactely 70 large particles on each of 6 1cm2 large pieces of scotch tape. The student counted the following 6 results: 72, 79, 65, 84, 67, 77. Does the student introduce a systematic error into the measurement?
(a) perform the test using a confidence interval
(b) Formulate the null and alternate hypotheses and perform a t-test at the 95% significance level.

3.) (8p) Ttest on cell experiments.  Chemical compounds that are carcinogenic to mammals also commonly cause genetic mutations in lower organisms. Preliminary screening of possible cancer-producing compounds can be performed by testing whether these compounds increase the mutation rate of microorganisms. Comparison of the log transformed colony counts of the untreated and treated groups can provide evidence for the safety of the chemical. (The logarithm of the colony count is used here instead of the count itself, because the data are heavily skewed. So, "2" stands for 102 colonies = 100 colonies).

Perform a ttest on the log colony counts as given in the table below to find out if there is sufficient evidence for the hypothesis that the particular chemical tested affects cell numbers/mutations.
 

Control
Treatment
2.13
1.42
1.59
1.73
1.14
1.57
1.77
1.49
1.36
2.52
1.46
1.83
1.19
1.35
 
1.53

 

Regression analysis

4) (8p) New York City has seen a considerable drop in crime rate in the last decades. Unemployment has been quoted as one potential factor controlling crime. Download this excel file that shows the  motor vehicle theft rate (=total number of thefts per 1000 NYC Population) and the unemplyment rate in % for NYC. Plot both varaibles as a function of time, make a scatter plot, perform a statistical analysis,  and answer the question: Is motor vehicle theft rate correlated with unemployment rate?