Miniprojects

The goal of a miniproject is to give you experience in all phases of a statistical study: Planning, Data Collection, Analysis and Conclusions. Each miniproject requires a written proposal and a written project report. The proposal and project report must be typed or word-processed. One copy of the proposal and one project report are to be submitted by the group.

The project report must contain the following sections. The grade for the project report will be assigned in the proportions indicated:

1.

Executive Summary (5%) A one page or less summary of the problem, data generation method, analysis and conclusions. Points will be assigned for conciseness, accuracy and content. (Note that this is a brief summary of items 2-5 below designed to give the essence of the report without the details.)

2.

Problem Description (10%) Why are you conducting this study? What is the question (or questions) you are trying to answer?

3.

Data Generation (20%) Is the data generation method you conducted appropriate to answering the questions you want to answer? Is it designed properly? If you conduct a sequence of data generating schemes, are the procedures you follow logical and justified by the previous results?

4.

Analysis (45%) Is the analysis appropriate and thorough? Does it provide an answer to the questions you asked? Are needed assumptions for statistical methods satisfied? How are missing values or outliers handled? Have you gotten all that can be gotten from the data?

5.

Conclusions (20%) Appropriateness (are conclusions based on results?), clarity, justification (are arguments well supported?).

To give you an idea of what is expected, a sample miniproject report is found at

http://www.math.wpi.edu/Course_Materials/SAS/projrep96/projrep96.html