Zachary Allen

Math 1040

Shalabi

Skittles Project

To illustrate the things I have learned in my math 1040 statistics class, I am doing a project to
find certain statistical values for a data set comprising of the data for percentages of colors in a skittle
bag.

The data in my individual sample was 13 Red, 15 Orange, 13 Yellow, 10 Green , and 11 Purple. The data
set of the entire class which is illustrated above seems pretty consistent with my findings. Orange and
red are slightly higher than the rest. One interesting difference is that in the total samples, my yellow
count was higher than the average. The variation from bag to bag is understandable and it would be
assumed that the greater the number of samples there are, the closer each color would be to 20%.
(Assuming there is not any factory adjustments to proportions.)
 Summary
statistics:

Column Mean Std. dev. Min Q1 Median Q3 Max

Class Count 615.4 22.71 581 608 622 624 642

The summary statistics and box plot show that the counts of colors from the class population of
skittle bags ranged from 581 to 642 with the median being 622. The mean is only slightly lower than the
median. The number of samples in the entire class was 51. My sample varied slightly as mentioned
previously, but there were no extreme values to throw the data.

The difference between categorical and quantitative data boils down to whether or not a
number can be assigned to a value. For instance, asking every member of a sample what their favorite
movie is would give you categorical data, while asking how many shoes they own will give you
quantitative data. When gathering categorical data a pie chart would be useful as it can show
percentages of each response. Similarly, when gathering quantitative data a box plot would be helpful
even though it would be useless when measuring categorical data.

Confidence Intervals

In statistics, confidence intervals are used to determine what percent of data if reproduced
would have the true mean. For example, the yellow Skittles makeup 20.97% of the total candies in the
total class counts. At a 99% confidence interval you can conclude, using technology, that in 99% of
repeat samples, yellow Skittles would be between 17.07% and 20.71% of the total number of Skittles.

If we were to take the confidence interval of the mean of the bags of candies which is 60.31
candies per bag at a 95% confidence interval with a standard deviation of 3.43 then we can be 95%
confident that a population mean will fall between 59.37 and 61.25 in any future samples.