Biostatistics Course Descriptions -

401077 Introduction to Biostatistics, Autumn 2020
Assignment 1 (Due Sunday March 29, 2020)
Your name:
Your student number:
Question 1 (2 marks)
a) Explain why heart rate (heartrte) is a quantitative variable. (1 mark)
Quantitative variables are variables with numerical values where arithmetic
operations such as addition, multiplication, subtraction and division can be carried on.
The heart rate is numeric and these operation can suffice. For instance it is possible to
compute the mean heart rate for the data hence it is quantitative.
b)
The student number is only important in tracing the questionnaires and where the data
originated from. It cannot be useful in making any generalization on the data hence it
is not a variable.
Question 2 (4 marks)
a) Histogram can be used to show the distribution serum total cholesterol (totchol) as
follows;

b)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's
133 205 232 234 256 600 4
As seen in the histogram above, the total cholesterol distribution is positively skewed.
More data if found on the right hand side. The value of mean >median hence shoving that the
data is right-skewed. The mean cholesterol for all the subjects was 234 mg/dL with a median
of 232 mg/dL.The standard deviation was 43.50 mg/dL.The lowest recorded cholesterol
amount was 133 mg/dL with 600 mg/dL being the highest amount of cholesterol recorded.
Question 3 (3 marks)
The Attained education was "0-11 years", "High school diploma", "Some college", “College
degree" with frequency distribution of 132, 86, 46 and 39 respectively. These were
substituted with letters to fit in the bar graph such as 0-11 years-A, High school diploma-B,
Some college-C, and College degree-D
The results revealed a skewed distribution where the distribution of subjects decreased with
increase with education level. The study subjects who had attained less education were more
compared to them that had attained higher education.
Question 4 (4 marks)

The Attained education was "0-11 years", "High school diploma", "Some college", “College
degree" were represented by 1.0,2.0,3.0 and 4.0 respectively in the above graph. It can be
noted that High school had the student with the highest cholesterol amount totalling to 600
which is probably an outlier. The population seems to have less cholesterol as they attain
higher education.