Scribd
Upload
7 views3 pages

Assignment 2_Questions

This document outlines the instructions for Assignment 2 of the SMDM course, which involves analyzing the HousePrices.jmp dataset to understand housing stock and prices in a medium-sized town in New York. Students are required to perform data analysis using JMP, create confidence intervals, estimate percentiles, and interpret results while adhering to academic integrity guidelines. The assignment is due on May 15 and is graded based on effort, with specific questions provided for analysis.

Uploaded by

Harsh Gupta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
7 views3 pages

Assignment 2_Questions

This document outlines the instructions for Assignment 2 of the SMDM course, which involves analyzing the HousePrices.jmp dataset to understand housing stock and prices in a medium-sized town in New York. Students are required to perform data analysis using JMP, create confidence intervals, estimate percentiles, and interpret results while adhering to academic integrity guidelines. The assignment is due on May 15 and is graded based on effort, with specific questions provided for analysis.

Uploaded by

Harsh Gupta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

SMDM: Term 1_2025-‘26

Assignment 2

Instructions:

1. This document uses HousePrices.jmp dataset which is available on the course website
alongside this homework.

2. Each week’s assignment requires you to perform some data analysis using JMP and turn
in a brief report of no more than three pages. A course in statistics is incomplete without
applying the learned ideas on datasets. JMP is a relatively friendly software to play around
with, and communicating your observations and results are an essential part of the course
learning.

3. Please remember to include your name, section, and PGID at the top of the assignment.
Also ensure that the submission filename includes your PGID followed byname.

4. The homework submissions will not be graded for correctness, but rather for effort. The
scoring will be binary – you will get full credit if your effort is deemed satisfactory,
otherwise you will get no credit. No credit will be given for late submissions. A timely
submission that responds to all questions and shows your thinking will be considered
satisfactory whether or not your solution is correct.

5. Honor code category 2N-b applies. Please ensure that the submitted write-up is entirely
your own work. Significant overlaps with other submissions maybe considered as
possible instances of violation of the honor code.

6. All assignments are individual assignments and each assignment is worth 5 points.

Have fun!!
1. Description of the dataset:

A real estate agent is trying to understand the nature of housing stock and home prices
in and around a medium sized town in upstate New York. She has collected data from
a random sample of 1047 homes sold in the last 12 months. Data was collected on the
following variables, and is available in the attached HousePrices.jmp file.

• Price – the sale price of the house in $


• Living Area – in Sq. ft.
• Bathrooms –number of bathrooms in the house (powder rooms with no tub or
shower area are considered 0.5 baths)
• Bedrooms – the number of bedrooms
• Lot Size – size of the property on which the house sits (in acres).
• Age – of the house in years
• Fireplace – whether or not the house has a fireplace (Yes = 1, No = 0)

Your task is to analyze this dataset in order to gain some understanding of this particular
real estate market – the values of homes, their characteristics in terms of size and
other features, and relationships between these. This understanding will prove
immensely helpful to the real estate agent in advising her clients. Since all of the homes
are from the same geographical area, location (which usually has a huge bearing on
home values) is not a major concern here.

Most of the analysis will be done in response to the specific questions posed on the
homework assignments. But feel free to explore and play around with the data set to
enhance your own understanding of how to make sense of data.
Assignment 2

Due: Thursday, May 15, 08:15 PM

1. Create the 90%, 95%, and 99% confidence intervals for the average home price
and explain what these mean. How do the margins of error for these three
confidence intervals compare? Does that make sense? Before creating the
confidence intervals, be sure to check the conditions necessary to create
confidence intervals (and briefly describe this in your submission).

2. Your friend has asked you to provide an estimate for the 95 th percentile of home
prices in this market. Which (if any) of the above confidence intervals can you
use to give an answer? Describe briefly.

3. The sample data given to you all come from home sales within the past 12
months. Suppose you had sample data of the same size each year going back
several years, and calculated the average sale price for each year. What kind of
distribution do you expect to see for these averages and why? (Include the
parameters of the distribution in your response, assuming that the house prices
don’t change i.e. go up or down, over time. Clearly this is not a great assumption,
but make it anyway.)

4. The architecture changed significantly in this geographical area about 30 years


ago. So any houses aged more than 30 years are considered “old” houses. What
proportion of the houses in the sample is old? Provide the 95% and 99%
confidence intervals for the proportion of old houses in this area, and interpret
them. Once again, make sure that the necessary conditions are satisfied before
creating confidence intervals.

Note: Q5 below is optional for now. If you do not attempt this now, please submit this along
with next week’ s assignment ( due May 24th ). In which case, you will be graded on 4 points for
now and 1 point for your submission of this question in next week's assignment.

5. Your friend claims that the average house price in this area is above $150K. Do
you agree? He also claims that the average living area is more than 1800 Sq.ft. Do
you agree with this? (Use a 5% significance level for both). Briefly explain what
the p-values in these cases mean?

You might also like