Web Exercises
- Using the site: https://www.data.gov/data-policy, browse datasets for an area of interest, and discuss how you would go about using multivariate statistics to test for relationships between variables. How would your hypotheses be worded?
- Review the following site on factor analysis at: http://www.statsoft.com/Textbook/Principal-Components-Factor-Analysis. Then, in your field of study, identify how you might utilize factor analysis to reduce the number of variables that would be involved in a multivariate analysis of a large dataset, and how you may empirically group indicators into a smaller set.
- Examine a dataset on monthly and annual retail trade at: http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/timeseries.html. Discuss how you would go about tracking relevant trends using these data, and how you could frame your study to better understand what factors affect spending rates.