Introduction to Biostatistics Assignment 1

401077 Introduction to Biostatistics, Autumn 2019
Assignment 1 (Due Sunday March 31, 2019)
BioStatistics
Student Name:
Instructor Name:
Course Number:
30 March 2019

Question 1 (2 marks)
Consider the example data set on workers in Sydney that you have been assigned for your
assignment. Identify all of the categorical variables in the data set.
Answer
The categorical variables are;
 Sex
 Married
 Education level
Question 2 (4 marks)
a) Using the data set on workers in Sydney assigned to you and R Commander, graph
the distribution of the variable age. (1 mark)
Answer

b) Using appropriate statistics from R Commander, write one or two sentences
describing the distribution of age. (Hint: consider measures of centre, spread and
shape. R commander output alone is insufficient – write the answer in your own
words.) (3 marks)
Answer
We computed the mean of the age to be 40.98 with the median age being 40. The
skewness value was found to be 0.11 (a value less than 0.5), which implies that the
data is close to normal distribution. The kurtosis value was obtained to be -1.12, this
value is less than zero implying that the distribution is light tails and is called a
platykurtic distribution.