Chapter 1: Introduction to dataContent check — Statistics (OpenIntro), Chapter 1: Introduction to data

Of the 224 patients in the treatment group, 45 had a stroke by the end of the first year. Using these two numbers, compute the proportion of patients in the treatment group who had a stroke by the end of their first year. (Please note: answers to all Guided Practice exercises are provided using footnotes.)

Migraine and acupuncture, Part I. A migraine is a particularly painful type of headache, which patients sometimes wish to treat with acupuncture. To determine whether acupuncture relieves migraine pain, researchers conducted a randomized controlled study where 89 females diagnosed with migraine headaches were randomly assigned to one of two groups: treatment or control. 43 patients in the treatment group received acupuncture that is specifically designed to treat migraines. 46 patients in the control group received placebo acupuncture (needle insertion at non-acupoint locations). 24 hours after patients received acupuncture, they were asked if they were pain free. Results are summarized in the contingency table below.

Figure from the original paper displaying the appropriate area (M) versus the inappropriate area (S) used in the treatment of migraine attacks.

What is the grade of the first loan in Figure 1.3? And what is the home ownership status of the borrower for that first loan? For these Guided Practice questions, you can check your answer in the footnote.

The grades for assignments, quizzes, and exams in a course are often recorded in a gradebook that takes the form of a data matrix. How might you organize grade data using a data matrix?

We consider data for 3,142 counties in the United States, which includes each county’s name, the state where it resides, its population in 2017, how its population changed from 2010 to 2017, poverty rate, and six additional characteristics. How might these data be organized in a data matrix?

An experiment is evaluating the effectiveness of a new drug in treating migraines. A group variable is used to indicate the experiment group for each patient: treatment or control. The num_migraines variable represents the number of migraines the patient experienced during a 3-month period. Classify each variable as either numerical or categorical.

Examine the variables in the loan50 data set, which are described in Figure 1.4. Create two questions about possible relationships between variables in loan50 that are of interest to you.

Air pollution and birth outcomes, study components. Researchers collected data to examine the relationship between air pollutants and preterm births in Southern California. During the study air pollution levels were measured by air quality monitoring stations. Specifically, levels of carbon monoxide were recorded in parts per million, nitrogen dioxide and ozone in parts per hundred million, and coarse particulate matter (PM⁠${}_{10}$⁠) in $\mu g/m^3$⁠. Length of gestation data were collected on 143,196 births between the years 1989 and 1993, and air pollution exposure during gestation was calculated for each birth. The analysis suggested that increased ambient PM⁠${}_{10}$ and, to a lesser degree, CO concentrations may be associated with the occurrence of preterm births.

Cheaters, study components. Researchers studying the relationship between honesty, age and self-control conducted an experiment on 160 children between the ages of 5 and 15. Participants reported their age, sex, and whether they were an only child or not. The researchers asked each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) on a paper sheet, and said they would only reward children who report white. The study’s findings can be summarized as follows: “Half the students were explicitly told not to cheat and the others were not given any explicit instructions. In the no instruction group probability of cheating was found to be uniform across groups based on child’s characteristics. In the group that was explicitly told to not cheat, girls were less likely to cheat, and while rate of cheating didn’t vary by age for boys, it decreased with age for girls.”

Migraine and acupuncture, Part II. Exercise 1.1 introduced a study exploring whether acupuncture had any effect on migraines. Researchers conducted a randomized controlled study where patients were randomly assigned to one of two groups: treatment or control. The patients in the treatment group received acupuncture that was specifically designed to treat migraines. The patients in the control group received placebo acupuncture (needle insertion at non-acupoint locations). 24 hours after patients received acupuncture, they were asked if they were pain free. What are the explanatory and response variables in this study?

Fisher’s irises. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist who worked on a data set that contained sepal length and width, and petal length and width from three species of iris flowers (setosa, versicolor and virginica). There were 50 flowers from each species in the data set.

(a) How many cases were included in the data?

(b) How many numerical variables are included in the data? Indicate what they are, and if they are continuous or discrete.

(c) How many categorical variables are included in the data, and what are they? List the corresponding levels (categories).

Photo by Ryan Claussen (http://flic.kr/p/6QTcuX) CC BY-SA 2.0 license

US Airports. The visualization below shows the geographical distribution of airports in the contiguous United States and Washington, DC. This visualization was constructed based on a dataset where each observation is an airport.

For the second and third questions above, identify the target population and what represents an individual case.

We can easily access ratings for products, sellers, and companies through websites. These ratings are based only on those people who go out of their way to provide a rating. If 50% of online reviews for a product are negative, do you think this means that 50% of buyers are dissatisfied with the product?

Suppose an observational study tracked sunscreen use and skin cancer, and it was found that the more sunscreen someone used, the more likely the person was to have skin cancer. Does this mean sunscreen causes skin cancer?

Figure 1.8 shows a negative association between the homeownership rate and the percentage of multi-unit structures in a county. However, it is unreasonable to conclude that there is a causal relationship between the two variables. Suggest a variable that might explain the negative relationship.

Air pollution and birth outcomes, scope of inference. Exercise 1.3 introduces a study where researchers collected data to examine the relationship between air pollutants and preterm births in Southern California. During the study air pollution levels were measured by air quality monitoring stations. Length of gestation data were collected on 143,196 births between the years 1989 and 1993, and air pollution exposure during gestation was calculated for each birth.

Buteyko method, scope of inference. Exercise 1.4 introduces a study on using the Buteyko shallow breathing technique to reduce asthma symptoms and improve quality of life. As part of this study 600 asthma patients aged 18-69 who relied on medication for asthma treatment were recruited and randomly assigned to two groups: one practiced the Buteyko method and the other did not. Those in the Buteyko group experienced, on average, a significant reduction in asthma symptoms and an improvement in quality of life.

Relaxing after work. The General Social Survey asked the question, “After an average work day, about how many hours do you have to relax or pursue activities that you enjoy?" to a random sample of 1,155 Americans. The average relaxing time was found to be 1.65 hours. Determine which of the following is an observation, a variable, a sample statistic (value calculated based on the observed sample), or a population parameter.

Course satisfaction across sections. A large college class has 160 students. All 160 students attend the lectures together, but the students are divided into 4 groups, each of 40 students, for lab sections administered by different teaching assistants. The professor wants to conduct a survey about how satisfied the students are with the course, and he believes that the lab section a student is in might affect the student’s overall satisfaction with the course.

Internet use and life expectancy. The following scatterplot was created as part of a study evaluating the relationship between estimated life expectancy at birth (as of 2014) and percentage of internet users (as of 2009) in 208 countries for which such data were available.

(a) Describe the relationship between life expectancy and percentage of internet users.

(b) What type of study is this?

(c) State a possible confounding variable that might explain this relationship and describe its potential effect.

Evaluate sampling methods. A university wants to determine what fraction of its undergraduate student body support a new $25 annual fee to improve the student union. For each proposed method below, indicate whether the method is reasonable or not.

Haters are gonna hate, study confirms. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology asked a group of 200 randomly sampled men and women to evaluate how they felt about various subjects, such as camping, health care, architecture, taxidermy, crossword puzzles, and Japan in order to measure their attitude towards mostly independent stimuli. Then, they presented the participants with information about a new product: a microwave oven. This microwave oven does not exist, but the participants didn’t know this, and were given three positive and three negative fake reviews. People who reacted positively to the subjects on the dispositional attitude measurement also tended to react positively to the microwave oven, and those who reacted negatively tended to react negatively to it. Researchers concluded that “some people tend to like things, whereas others tend to dislike things, and a more thorough understanding of this tendency will lead to a more thorough understanding of the psychology of attitudes."

Sampling strategies. A statistics student who is curious about the relationship between the amount of time students spend on social networking sites and their performance at school decides to conduct a survey. Various research strategies for collecting data are described below. In each, name the sampling method proposed and any bias you might expect.

Look back to the study in Section 1.1 where researchers were testing whether stents were effective at reducing strokes in at-risk patients. Is this an experiment? Was the study blinded? Was it double-blinded?

For the study in Section 1.1, could the researchers have employed a placebo? If so, what would that placebo have looked like?

Light and exam performance. A study is designed to test the effect of light level on exam performance of students. The researcher believes that light levels might have different effects on males and females, so wants to make sure both are equally represented in each treatment. The treatments are fluorescent overhead lighting, yellow overhead lighting, no overhead lighting (only desk lamps).

Light, noise, and exam performance. A study is designed to test the effect of light level and noise level on exam performance of students. The researcher believes that light and noise levels might have different effects on males and females, so wants to make sure both are equally represented in each treatment. The light treatments considered are fluorescent overhead lighting, yellow overhead lighting, no overhead lighting (only desk lamps). The noise treatments considered are no noise, construction noise, and human chatter noise.

Soda preference. You would like to conduct an experiment in class to see if your classmates prefer the taste of regular Coke or Diet Coke. Briefly outline a design for this study.

Pet names. The city of Seattle, WA has an open data portal that includes pets registered in the city. For each registered pet, we have information on the pet’s name and species. The following visualization plots the proportion of dogs with a given name versus the proportion of cats with the same name. The 20 most common cat and dog names are displayed. The diagonal line on the plot is the $x=y$ line; if a name appeared on this line, the name’s popularity would be exactly the same for dogs and cats.

(a) Are these data collected as part of an experiment or an observational study?

(b) What is the most common dog name? What is the most common cat name?

(c) What names are more common for cats than dogs?

(d) Is the relationship between the two variables positive or negative? What does this mean in context of the data?

Chia seeds and weight loss. Chia Pets – those terra-cotta figurines that sprout fuzzy green hair – made the chia plant a household name. But chia has gained an entirely new reputation as a diet supplement. In one 2009 study, a team of researchers recruited 38 men and divided them randomly into two groups: treatment or control. They also recruited 38 women, and they randomly placed half of these participants into the treatment group and the other half into the control group. One group was given 25 grams of chia seeds twice a day, and the other was given a placebo. The subjects volunteered to be a part of the study. After 12 weeks, the scientists found no significant difference between the groups in appetite or weight loss.

Flawed reasoning. Identify the flaw(s) in reasoning in the following scenarios. Explain what the individuals in the study should have done differently if they wanted to make such strong conclusions.

Eat better, feel better? In a public health study on the effects of consumption of fruits and vegetables on psychological well-being in young adults, participants were randomly assigned to three groups: (1) diet-as-usual, (2) an ecological momentary intervention involving text message reminders to increase their fruits and vegetable consumption plus a voucher to purchase them, or (3) a fruit and vegetable intervention in which participants were given two additional daily servings of fresh fruits and vegetables to consume on top of their normal diet. Participants were asked to take a nightly survey on their smartphones. Participants were student volunteers at the University of Otago, New Zealand. At the end of the 14-day study, only participants in the third group showed improvements to their psychological well-being across the 14-days relative to the other groups.

Stanford Open Policing. The Stanford Open Policing project gathers, analyzes, and releases records from traffic stops by law enforcement agencies across the United States. Their goal is to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public. The following is an excerpt from a summary table created based off of the data collected as part of this project.