The University of Nottingham
SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
SPRING SEMESTER SEMESTER 2025
MATH2110 - STATISTICS 3
Coursework 1
Deadline: 3pm, Friday 14/3/2025
Your neat, clearly-legible solutions should be submitted electronically as a Jupyter or PDF file via the MATH2110
Moodle page by the deadline indicated there. As this work is assessed, your submission must be entirely your
own work (see the University’s policy on Academic Misconduct).
Submissions up to five working days late will be subject to a penalty of 5% of the maximum mark per working
day.
Deadline extensions due to Support Plans and Extenuating Circumstances can be requested according to
School and University policies, as applicable to this module. Because of these policies, solutions (where
appropriate) and feedback cannot normally be released earlier than 10 working days after the main cohort
submission deadline.
Please post any academic queries in the corresponding Moodle forum, so that everyone receives the same
assistance. As it’s assessed work, I will only be able to answer points of clarification.
The work is intended to be approximately equal to a week’s worth of study time on the module for a student
who has worked through the module content as intended - including the R aspects. If you have any issues
relating to your own personal circumstances, then please email me.
THE DATA
The objective is to build a predictive model for the median house price in Boston neighbourhoods using various
neighbourhood characteristics. Median house price is a crucial indicator for urban planning and economic
studies. It is important to understand how different social indicators affect it. To this end, the dataset we will
analyse here contains detailed records of 506 neighbourhoods, capturing factors such as crime rates, age of
the properties, etc.
The training and test data are provided in the files BostonTrain.csv and BostonTest.csv available at the Moodle
page. The train file contains observations for 404 neighbourhoods. The target variable is medv, median value
of houses in thousands of dollars. The predictors include:
• crim, which contains the per capita crime rate by town.
• zn, which contains the proportion of residential land.
• rm, which contains the average number of rooms per house.
• age, which contains the proportion of houses built before 1940.
• dis, which contains distances to large employment centres.
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• ptratio, which contains the student-teacher ratio by town.
• lstat, which contains the percentage of lower-status population.
The test data is provided in the file BostonTest.csv, containing observations for 102 neighbourhoods. The
test data should only be used to evaluate the predictive performance of your models.
THE TASKS
(a) (80 marks) Using only the training data (BostonTrain.csv), develop one or more models to predict the
median house price (medv) based on the predictor variables. You may use any methods covered in this
module. For this part, the test data must not be used. Your analysis should include:
– Model selection and justification.
– Diagnostics to assess the quality of your model(s).
– Interpretation of the model parameters. Which parameters seem to have a greater importance for
prediction?
(b) (20 marks) Use your “best” model(s) from (a) to predict the median house price (medv) for the neighbourhoods
in the test dataset (BostonTest.csv). Provide appropriate numerical summaries and plots to evaluate the
quality of your predictions. Compare your predictions to those of a simple linear model of the form:
medv ∼ crim.
NOTES
• An approximate breakdown of marks for part (a) is: exploratory analysis (20 marks), model selection
(40 marks), model checking and discussion (20 marks). About half the marks for each are for doing
technically correct and relevant things, and half for discussion and interpretation of the output. However,
this is only a guide, and the work does not have to be rigidly set out in this manner. There is some natural
overlap between these parts, and overall level of presentation and focus of the analysis are also important
in the assessment. The above marks are also not indicative of the relative amount of output/discussion
needed for each part, it is the quality of what is produced/discussed which matters.
• As always, the first step should be to do some exploratory analysis. However, you do not need to go
overboard on this. Explore the data yourself, but you only need to report the general picture, plus any
findings you think are particularly important.
• For the model fitting/selection, you can use any of the frequentist techniques we have covered to investigate
potential models - automated methods can be used to narrow down the search, but you can still use
hypothesis tests, e.g. if two different automated methods/criteria suggest slightly different models.
• Please make use of the help files for 𝑅 commands. Some functions may require you to change their
arguments a little from examples in the notes, or behaviour/output can be controlled by setting optional
arguments.
• You should check the model assumptions and whether conclusions are materially affected by any influential
data points.
• The task is deliberately open-ended: as this is a realistic situation with real data, there is not one single
correct answer, and different selection methods may suggest different “best” models - this is normal.
Your job is to investigate potential models using the information and techniques we have covered. The
important point is that you correctly use some of the relevant techniques in a logical and principled
manner, and provide a concise but insightful summary of your findings and reasoning. Note however
that you do not have to produce a report in a formal “report” format.
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• You do not need to include all your 𝑅 output, as you will likely generate lots of output when experimenting.
For example, you may look at quite a large number of different plots and you might do lots of experimentation
in the model development stage. You only need to report the important plots/output which justify your
decisions and conclusions, and whilst there is no word or page limit, an overly-verbose analysis with
unnecessary output will detract from the impact.
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