Stat 20 Section Worksheet 2

Problems from FPP, Chapter 2:

1. (R.4) The Public Health Service studied the effects of smoking on health, in a large
sample of representative households. For men and for women in each age group,
those who had never smoked were on average somewhat healthier than the
current smokers, but the current smokers were on average much healthier than
those who had recently stopped smoking.
A. Why did they study men and women and different age groups separately?
B. The lesson seems to be that you should not start smoking, but once you’ve
started, don’t stop. Comment.

Functions in R and RStudio

The input(s) of a function are called argument(s). The output from the function is
called the return value. When we provide a function with argument(s) and press
Return, we are calling or invoking the function. Later, we will learn how to write our
own functions.
To find out more about a particular function, you can go to the help tab in RStudio in
the lower right panel and search for the function name. You can also just use your
favorite search engine online and search for R and a keyword or two, including the
name of the function if you know it.
The help in R or online is often much more than you really want to read. If you want a
brief description, start to type a function and pause. A tooltip will appear that has any
functions starting with whatever you’ve typed so far, including a brief description of
whichever one is highlighted. If you press return, RStudio will complete typing
whichever one of those functions is highlighted and type parentheses for you.
Now suppose we want to simulate a die roll. The sample() function will help us do
that. The sample function has 4 arguments: x, size, replace, and prob. You can verify
this by typing a few letters of the function and waiting for the tooltip to appear. Try it!
We’ve used the function c() to combine or concatenate. You put numbers in the
parentheses, separated by commas, as inputs or arguments and this function will
return you a vector. Try it!
> c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Assign the vector to y.
> y = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
According to the tooltip (or help) for the sample() function, the first argument is x,
and the function will sample from the elements of x.
You can specify the arguments in R explicitly by writing something like:
> sample(x=y, size =1)
or you can specify based on position.
> sample(y, 1)
will do exactly the same thing. Try it! Then do this:
> sample(size = 1, y)
This is the same thing. R sees that you explicitly want the size argument to be 1,
then it continues to look for any arguments that you haven’t specified yet, finds y, and
interprets that as the next argument that it doesn’t know yet, x.
So now you’ve seen several ways to roll a die a single time. Now as exercises try each
of these.
1. Simulate two die rolls. (Careful, you’ll need to use the replace argument.)
2. Eight die rolls (you won’t be able to do this unless you are using the replace
argument correctly).
3. One die roll, but make it so that each of the faces has an equal chance except that
rolling a 6 is twice as likely as anything else. (What does the prob argument do?)
4. Instead of typing c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), there’s a shorthand notation, 1:6.
Use this notation to simulate 20 rolls of a die with values from 1 to 11. You can do
it all as one line without assigning anything.