NERS 488/688 LABORATORY 3

SAMPLING PRECISION

 

1)      Use the Excel spreadsheet, Binomiallab.xls in the Public folder for NERS 488-688.

2)      Data in sheet 1 were generated from a series of coin toss experiments with different probabilities of producing a head and different numbers of tosses.  Each column represents 100 experiments of n tosses each.

a)      Estimate the mean probability of heads and the variance of the proportion for each set of 100 experiments.  

b)      Plot the results using the Histogram function from Data Analysis.

c)      Based on your understanding of the binomial, which sets of experiments had the largest number of tosses.  Can you estimate how many?

    Note that E(x/n) = q, and var(x/n) = q(1-q)/n.

 

3)      Data in sheet 2 were generated from a normal distribution.

a)      Estimate the mean and variance of the means (SE²) for each set of data.

b)      How did the standard errors vary as a function of sample size?