STAT6202 Exercises 10

1. The number of accident cases admitted to Battle Hospital, Reading, over a period of 70 weeks during
1969/70 classified according to the day of admission are shown below.
Day of admission: Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Total
Number of admissions: 366 405 408 379 409 385 448 2800

Are these results consistent with a common accident admission rate for each day of the week? (Carry out
an appropriate test.)

2. Each year it is recorded whether or not each of 100 council house tenants have required plumbing repairs
to their houses during that year. The following table gives data for ten consecutive years.
No. of years with
at least 1 repair: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
No. of houses: 15 19 36 16 11 1 2 0 0 0 0 100

(a) Assuming that the binomial distribution is applicable, estimate the probability that a tenant requires
at least one plumbing repair in a year.
(b) Fit a binomial distribution to the data and assess the goodness of fit. (Pool the frequencies for 4 or
more years into a single group.)
(c) Do the data support the view that the probability that a plumbing repair is needed varies between
tenants?

3. A random sample of 125 firms based in the city of Plymouth was selected in order to examine whether
there is any systematic pattern in the industrial composition of different parts of the city. The city was
divided into three regions: the docks and adjacent areas, the older central parts of the city, and the newer
suburban areas. Each firm was classified under one of the following headings: I - primary industries,
plus shipbuilding; II - engineering, brick and cement industries; III - other industries, including clothing,
food, furniture and printing. The numbers of firms classified by type and location were as follows:
Type of Industry
I II III Total
Location
Docks 24 11 23 58
Central 8 9 19 36
Suburbs 7 15 9 31

Total 39 35 51 125

(a) Make a table of row proportions, i.e., showing the proportions (to 2 decimal places) of each type of
industry for each location. Comment briefly on what this table tells you.
(b) Carry out a χ2 -test to investigate formally whether there is any evidence of association between type
of industry and location within Plymouth, and report your conclusions. Explain in non-technical
terms what the null hypothesis is for this test.
4. A cellular car phone company conducted a survey of 187 members of three professions. Of 81 doctors
surveyed 42 had a car phone; of 55 lawyers surveyed 21 had a car phone and of 51 accountants surveyed
13 had a car phone.

(a) Make up a contingency table, with Profession as rows and Car Phone Ownership as columns.
(b) Calculate, for each profession, the proportion who own a car phone and the standard error of this
proportion, and add these to your table in (a) as two further columns.
(c) Test whether there is any evidence of association between profession and car phone ownership.
How does the null hypothesis of this test relate to the proportions in (b)?
(d) Calculate a 95% confidence interval for the difference in the proportions of doctors and accountants
who own a car phone. Interpret the calculated interval.

5. The US aerospace and defence industry wanted to predict the cost of sending an object into space from
the weight of the object. The following data give the cost in billions of dollars, y, and the weight in tons,
x, for 8 satellites. Also shown are scatter plots of y against x, y against loge x, and loge y against loge x.

(a) What have the transformations of log cost and log weight achieved?
(b) The least squares regression equation of log y on log x is

log y = −2.8861 + 0.4963 log x

and the residual standard deviation is 0.1452. Also, writing u = log x, you can check that Cuu =
(n − 1)s2u = 28.8279. Calculate the standard error of the estimate of the slope parameter, and hence
obtain a 95% confidence interval for this parameter.
(c) Estimate the average cost of a satellites weighing 3000 tons, and obtain a a 95% confidence interval
for this average cost. (Note: estimate the log of the cost and then transform this to a cost; similarly
for the confidence interval.)