Statistics for Business - Descriptive Statistics, Frequency Distribution, Probability Distribution, Contingency Table and Scatter Plot

Statistics for Business
Student Name:
Student Number:
Date: 12th December 2018

Task 1:
A. Drawing random sample of 250
Answer
We drew a random sample of 250 samples (attached in the excel). The sampling method
used was a random sampling method. In my opinion this is not the best method especially
when one is interested in characteristics such as gender of the household head, education
level etc. this is because there is likelihood of mixing up the characteristics in the sample
and having sample with unwanted characteristics. The best sampling method would be
convenience sampling.
B. Computation of descriptive statistics and drawing a box-whisker plot of expenditure on
alcohol, meals, fuel and phone
Answer
In this section, we present the descriptive statistics for alcohol, meals, fuel and phone
expenditures.
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics
Alcohol Meals Fuel Phone
Mean 1018.58 946.57 2045.20 1342.46
Standard Error 85.40 67.35 178.89 78.74
Median 522.00 600.00 1410.00 1080.00
Mode 0.00 0.00 1200.00 1200.00
Standard Deviation 1350.24 1064.84 2828.49 1245.07
Sample Variance 1823134.91 1133887.79 8000342.36 1550192.32
Kurtosis 12.70 5.27 84.17 14.56
Skewness 2.73 2.12 7.55 3.11
Range 10949.00 6000.00 36000.00 10200.00
Minimum 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum 10949.00 6000.00 36000.00 10200.00
Sum 254645.00 236642.00 511300.00 335614.00
Count 250 250 250 250

Box-whisker plot
The below plot is the box-whisker plot for the four variables (alcohol, meals, fuel and
phone)
Figure 1: Whisker-box plot for expenditure on alcohol, meals, fuel and phone
C. Summary based on the descriptive and the whisker-box plot
Answer
Result showed that more expenditure went towards fuel (M = 2045.30, SD = 2828.49)
while the lowest average expenditure was on meals (M = 946.57, SD = 1064.84).
Expenditure on alcohol and phone on average was 1018.58 and 1342.46 respectively. The
whisker-box plot shows that the 4 variables had a number of outliers implying that the
four are likely to be skewed due to huge number of outliers.
The skewness values showed all the four variables were highly skewed but with the
expenditure on fuel being the most skewed (highly skewed with skewness value of 7.55)
followed by expenditure on phone with a skewness value of 3.11, meals had a skewness
of 2.12 while alcohol had a skewness value of 2.73.