Applied Statistics, Lab 1

The purpose of this lab is to introduce you to using R and LaTeX (or remind you!), to get used to carrying out analyses in a reproducible way, and to start working on the presentation of your results. The data set is intentionally small and simple, so that you can focus on documenting your work without having to worry about also applying more complex analysis techniques - that will come later!

A cloud-seeding experiment was carried out to determine if cloud seeding increases rainfall. The data contain rainfall amounts (in units of acre-feet) from 52 clouds, 26 of which were chosen at random and seeded with silver nitrate (clouds were randomly seeded or not with silver nitrate).

Your job this time is to provide a report for a meterologist collaborator describing the data and any relevant exploratory analyses. This collaborator knows a small amount of statistics, but not enough to carry out the analyses alone. Your report should give a short background/purpose, data description and description of your analyses, along with any supporting plots/tables, and a concluding summary. To allow sufficient time to learn R and LaTeX (or to get started using Sweave if you are already familiar with them), we will NOT meet next week (7 October 2010). The next class meeting will be the following week on 14 October 2010. Please feel free to email me in the meantime if you have any questions.

Your report can be in English or French. Please include a .tex file (or .Rnw file if you have used one) and .pdf file. Please follow the naming convention: surname1.tex, etc. (e.g. my files would be goldstein1.Rnw, goldstein1.pdf). For full re-write privileges, please email your report files to me (darlene.goldstein at epfl.ch) before Tuesday 12 October 2010.