AMA 241 Figuring Out Statistics Assessed Coursework 3 Submit by the 5pm on 21st March 2012

Your answer to this coursework will be assessed and your marks will contribute 30% to your total for the module. You should submit your answers to the General Office (HJ609) by the time shown above. If you hand this assignment in late, a mark of 0 will be recorded, unless you make a case for leniency which is accepted by the lecturer. This coursework tests your ability on survey sampling and designing indices. The data provided in this coursework are downloadable from the WebCT website and they are in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format (xls). This assignment contains two questions. Each question contributes 15 marks out of 30 total marks to the whole assignment. You now can use any software packages like Excel (presumably), Matlab, R, SAS to handle this relatively large data set. 1) A survey was conducted in the week 8 lecture for understanding the behaviour of students diet. A relatively short questionnaire in this survey contains only two questions: Have you eaten? and How much did you spend for your lunch today?. The panel data set contains 3 columns: the order of sample element, the answer of the first question (Yes=1, No=0) and the amount student spent on their lunch (Zero number means either they didnt have lunch or they had free lunch). Assume the population size N=99 is known, download the dataset from the WebCT and answer the following questions. a) Write down the sample size. b) Calculate the estimated proportion of students who have had their lunch and give a 95% confidence interval of the estimation. c) There are so many zeros in the column 3 because the amount zeros are recorded if the student did not have his lunch. Use the Microsoft Excel command =IF(B2=1,C2,"") to delete the zeros in the third column and calculate the average amount spending and sample standard deviation for those students have had their lunch then calculate the confidence interval under the new set of sample without zeros. d) Discuss how the zeros affect your estimation of the average amount on students spending for their lunch. You may use the following formula for variance estimation of the proportion p N n pq Var ( p ) = N n 1

2) In the week 7 lecture, we have introduced the university ranking methodology of the education18 company. The original detailed calculations are shown below: Items Admissions Grades Research Performance Research Output Lecturer/Student Ratio Library Collections Total % Weight 35% 30% 14% 14% 7% 100
HKU CUHK HKUST PolyU CityU HKBU LU HKIEd

0.350 0.300 0.140 0.105 0.070 96.50

0.306 0.300 0.123 0.105 0.053 88.70

0.263 0.300 0.053 0.105 0.009 73.00

0.219 0.150 0.105 0.140 0.018 63.20

0.131 0.188 0.088 0.140 0.061 60.80

0.219 0.075 0.070 0.035 0.035 43.40

0.088 0.150 0.018 0.018 0.044 31.80

0.044 0.038 0.035 0.105 0.026 24.80

(http://www.education18.com/include/ranking/2011/Appendix1.pdf ) Suppose you are a designer of the new university table, you would like to add the item Historical Heritage as one of the criteria of a successful university (Older University, more prestigious). The new weightings of the index are: Admissions Research Research Lecturer/Student Library Historical Grades Performance Output Ratio Collections Heritage 25% 30% 20% 10% 5% 10% The years of establishment of eight universities are
HKU CUHK HKUST PolyU CityU HKBU LU HKIEd

1911

1963

1991

1937

1984

1956

1888

1994

a) Give detailed calculations of the university ranking under your new methodological framework and rank all the universities. b) Is it possible to make Lingnan University ranked the first in the table? If so, why?