Business Statistics

Minor Assignment

This assignment requires a considerable amount of computer work and written comment. You may need to seek guidance from your tutor along the way. Do not leave the Assignment until too late. Each question carefully describes what you are required to do, so please follow the instructions carefully. Your answer to each question should begin with the number of the question. Refer to the Assessment Criteria and General Marking Guide below for details.

In this assignment you will examine injury data obtained from a company that wishes to do some simple exploratory data analysis on the injuries sustained by its employees. Each time an employee is injured costs this company in time and money. This company hopes that by analysing the injury data their safety performance might improve. The data is contained in the file Employee Injury Data.xls and contains the following columns (variables):

Variable Description

Site Company workplace: 1 = City Site, 2 = Rural Site, 3 = Inter-state Site

Rpt Date Date the accident was reported

Days Lost Number of days off work lost due to the injury

Cost $ Cost of the injury to the Company

Age Age of the employee injured

Nature The type of injury

Mechanism How the injury occurred

Location The main part of the body where the injury occurred

Agency The most likely reason for the injury

Task 1: Variable List: Using the variables listed in the table above state whether the variable is qualitative or quantitative, and if it is quantitative also state whether it is discrete or continuous.

Costs of Injuries: One of the main concerns to the company is the costs associated with employee injuries.

Task 2: Histogram: Create a histogram showing the distribution of costs. Comment upon the shape of the distribution: is it symmetric? If it is not, is it positively or negatively skewed? Are there any outliers present? If so, are they of particular interest to the company?

Which central measure would be best to use to describe the centre of this distribution? Give reason(s) for your answer.

Task 3: Descriptive Statistics: Prepare a simple summary table that shows the average and standard deviation of injury costs for the three work sites. Construct side-by-side boxplots for the injury costs. Briefly comment upon any differences you observe in injury costs for each work site.

Task 4: Pivot Table: Construct one pivot table that shows how many injuries of each type occur at each site. Place nature of injuries in the rows, sites in the columns and a count of the nature of the injuries in the body of the table.

If the Company wanted to improve their safety record which injury types should they focus their attention upon at each site?

Conclusion: From the tasks above, you should have some idea of the safety performance of this company. In this section you should write a short paragraph summarising your main findings and provide a final recommendation about how this company might improve their 2marks safety record.