Final Exam
Due Wed. May 6
  1. Your benevolent professor is alive today because the grocery stores in Blacksburg, Virginia sell hotdogs, rice, and grits. As starving graduate students yourselves, this problem should hit home. Consider the data set hotdogs.data, which gives the calorie content per hotdog, milligrams sodium per hotdog, and type of hotdog (either Beef, Meat, or Poultry) for various brands of hotdogs.
    1. What can you say about the relationship between the type of hotdog and the calorie content?
    2. Build another model to describe how the sodium content affects this relationship?
  2. Your benevolent professor despises the cold. This is why he moved from the mountains in Virginia to the balmy clime of Texas. On April 7 2008, it froze in Tyler, Texas. Al Gore notwithstanding, this should be taken as a call to all responsible, thinking, caring men and women to increase the rate of global warming, before your benevolent professor freezes to death. Consider the data set carmileage.data (from the EPA) relating miles per gallon (MPG) of passenger automobiles to the passenger cabin volume (VOL), the engine horsepower (HP), the top speed (SP), and the vehicle weight (WT). Build model(s) and discuss the effects of each of these variables on vehicle miles per gallon.
  3. Your benevolent professor played (not very well) Little League Baseball in his youth in Maryland (I realize the connection here is tenuous, but this is a fine data set to analyze anyway -- they do sell your benevolent professor's favorite beverage at baseball games, but they do this everywhere except in Tyler, Texas, so I guess the connection is still tenuous). Anyway, the question here is, ``Is there a home field advantage in baseball?'' The data worldseries.data are from world series teams from 1922 to 1992 and give the home and away winning percentages for the American League and National League team playing in the world series. Fit an appropriate model and answer the question.