AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH SCHOOL OF FINANCE, ACTUARIAL STUDIES, AND STATISTICS
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS (STAT1008)
SEMESTER 1 2023
ASSIGNMENT
DUE DATE: Wednesday 17 May 2023, by 11:59pm
(25% of total course grade)
OBJECTIVES
The main goal of this assignment is to help you have fun with the statistical tools that you have learned in
this course, and to do so in a realistic data collection and data analysis setting. This assignment is a great
way to solidify your understand of exploratory data analysis; a key preliminary step in any statistical
project. This assignment will also give you hands on practice in conducting statistical hypothesis testing
in a realistic data analysis setting. Hypothesis testing supports evidence based decision making so it is
important to be competent in carrying out a hypothesis test and interpreting the results.
REQUIREMENTS
In this assignment you are required to analyse a dataset of your choice using the statistical tools and
methods discussed in Chapters 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 of the textbook. You will need to write a report to
present and discuss the results of your analysis. You will need to decide on what data summaries and
graphical displays to produce, and what numerical descriptive measures to calculate for inclusion in your
report. You are required to carry out at least two different hypothesis tests on your chosen data set.
You will need to decide on what hypotheses to test, provide step-by-step details of your calculations, and
interpret your analysis results in relation to your original questions of interest.
Your data set must include at least one numerical variable.
The dataset you choose could be one of academic or personal interest to you and can come from any field.
The freedom to choose your own dataset gives you the opportunity to stimulate your intellectual curiosity
so find data you are excited to work with!! The data set can come from any field such as economics, law,
medicine, education, sport, psychology, natural science, media, public policy, sociology etc. Your analysis
must be original and must not be copied from another source. Once you have chosen your dataset, you
may wish to confirm with your tutor or the course convenor that your choice of data set is suitable for
the assignment in terms of complexity and structure. A minimum sample size of 50 is recommended.
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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH SCHOOL OF FINANCE, ACTUARIAL STUDIES, AND STATISTICS
CAUTIONS!!
• YOU MUST ANALYSE RAW, INDIVIDUAL LEVEL DATA (NOT AGGREGATED DATA). DO
NOT ANALYSE DATA ALREADY SUMMARISED IN A FREQUENCY OR SUMMARY TABLE.
(Note: data tables available for public download from the Australian Bureau of Statistics tend to
be in aggregated form already, so this data is not suitable for the assignment).
• THE STATISTICAL HYPOTHESIS TESTING TOOLS WE LEARN IN THIS COURSE REQUIRE
INDEPENDENT UNITS OF OBSERVATIONS. FOR EXAMPLE, SERIALLY CORRELATED
DATA (that is, data taken at yearly or other regular time intervals) ARE NOT INDEPENDENT.
So time series data (eg. share prices over time) are not suitable for the assignment.
DATA SOURCES
If you have a specific topic or data field in mind, try running an internet search for your topic eg.
basketball data, human rights data, cost of living data .
For a general search of datasets from a variety of topics, the following websites may be useful:
• The Data and Story Library https://dasl.datadescription.com/
• UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php
For those interested in global and country-level data, you may find the following websites useful:
• Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/
• OECD Data https://data.oecd.org/
As an alternative to sourcing data from the internet, you might like to collect your own data (by conducting
your own survey for example) to answer some questions of interest to you. For example, what is the
average number of hours per week university students work in a paid position? What is the average
weekly expenditure for a university student?
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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH SCHOOL OF FINANCE, ACTUARIAL STUDIES, AND STATISTICS
REPORT GUIDELINES
You must submit a written report to communicate your project findings. Please include the following
sections in your report:
• INTRODUCTION:
• State your research objectives. What applied questions are you trying to answer? Be very
explicit and clear on what your null hypothesis and what your alternative hypothesis are using
the framework discussed in class (H0 : .....) (HA : .....)
• State why your research questions are of personal and practical interest.
• DATA SET DESCRIPTION:
• State the source of your data set. Either provide the website address(es) if you downloaded
the data from the internet or state that you conducted your own study to collect the data.
• Target population and data collection method. What is your population of interest? When
was the data collected? What was the sampling method? If there are biases in the data
collection method, be sure to comment on how this may affect the validity of your results.
• Data set size and variables. How many observations and variables are in the data set? Which
variables will you analyse and why? Classify the variables by type (numerical, categorical
etc....) Note: You do not need to analyse all the variables in your chosen data set. For
example, suppose you have a data set which was collected to study the relationship between
exercise and sleep patterns. The data set has 50+ variables containing demographic and
lifestyle information on the study participants. However, you are particularly interested to see
whether there is an association between amount of hours slept per night and exercise hours
per week, so you focus on these two variables for your analysis.
• DATA SUMMARIES
• Provide summary (frequency or contingency) tables for your chosen variables. Include some
graphical displays (bar charts, histograms, scatter plots etc.)
• Provide some numerical descriptive measures of your chosen variables (example, sample means,
sample variances, sample proportions). Include a box and whisker plot for your numerical
variable(s).
• From your data summaries, what conclusions can you draw about the shape of the distribution
of your variables or relationships between variables? Try to explain any patterns in the data
you notice.
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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH SCHOOL OF FINANCE, ACTUARIAL STUDIES, AND STATISTICS
• HYPOTHESIS TESTS - RESULTS and DISCUSSION:
• Carry out your hypothesis tests. This includes writing the value of the test statistic, specifying
the critical value and reporting the p-value. Also state your chosen significance level.
• Include confidence interval estimates.
• Justify that your data variables conform to the assumptions required by your hypothesis tests.
• Interpret your results in relation to your applied research questions and provide some practical,
intuitive reasoning behind your results.
• REMEMBER: Two different hypothesis tests are required on your chosen dataset.
• CONCLUSIONS:
• Briefly summarise your key findings.
• Discuss any limitations of your analysis and potential future improvements. Are there any
further questions you would like to answer using the data if you had the relevant statistical
knowledge?
• REFERENCE LIST: If applicable (see https://www.anu.edu.au/students/academic-skills/
academic-integrity/referencing for standard referencing styles)
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
• Total length: 10-15 pages (including graphs, excluding reference list). Note this is a guideline
on total length. A submission greater than 20 pages will be penalised and the pages exceeding the
page limit will not be graded. On the other hand, it is doubtful that all elements of the assignment
can be adequately addressed in 5 pages, hence a minimum length of around 10 pages is expected.
• This assignment is to be done individually. University policies on plagiarism and academic integrity
will be strictly enforced. (https://services.anu.edu.au/learning-teaching/academic-integrity/
academic-integrity-best-practice-principles-for-learners.
• DO NOT USE ChatGPT or any other Artificial Intelligence tool to generate a report for submission.
• The assignment must be submitted online on the Wattle course website via Turnitin. Please submit
your report as a ‘.doc’ or‘.pdf’ file.
• Presumably your calculations will be done on a calculator, Excel, or some other statistical software
package. You do not need to provide the mathematical formulae for the quantities you calculate nor
provide extensive working. You can simply state your numerical results, for example, ‘The mean of
variable X is 3.5’.
• No late assignments or hard copy assignments will be accepted without prior permission from the
course convenor. Extension requests are to be submitted online on the course Wattle site. (See the
assessment extension block in the top right corner of the Wattle site).
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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH SCHOOL OF FINANCE, ACTUARIAL STUDIES, AND STATISTICS
MARKING GUIDELINES
The assignment will be marked according to the following rubric:
Item Total marks
available
Notes
Clarity 3 Is your report logically structured, easy to follow and neatly
presented? Are your research objectives clearly stated and
justified? Have you included a project title? Are your graphs
clear and well labelled?
Interest 3 Did you state why your data set is of personal interest to
you? Did you describe the practical importance of your
research questions? Did your data set have a mix of different
variable types? Is the sample size big enough?
Dataset
description
3 Did you answer all the questions in this section as required?
Data
summaries
5 Did you calculate a variety of numerical descriptive
measures? Have you included some summary tables and
graphs? Have you provided some commentary and/or
interpretation of your summary tables and graphs?
Hypothesis
tests
5 Did you conduct at least two hypothesis tests? Are your
null and alternative hypotheses clearly stated using the
statistical notation shown in lectures? Did you provide
step-by-step calculation details? Did you provide confidence
interval estimates? Did you justify the assumptions required
for the statistical methods you used?
Discussion 3 Did you interpret your hypothesis test results in relation to
your research questions? Do your results confirm your initial
hypothesis or are they counterintuitive? Did you provide
some practical or intuitive explanation for your results?
Conclusions 3 Did you discuss the limitations of your analysis? Have you
discussed potential future improvements to your study?
Total 25
Some tips:
• Choose a dataset you have a personal interest in.
• Consult with the teaching staff for advice and to check whether your chosen dataset is appropriate
or not.
• There is no need to use statistical methods that we haven’t discussed in class yet.
Additional notes:
• For copyright reasons and to avoid plagiarism, sample assignment reports cannot be made available
to students.