Mini-Assignment 4

The data set utilities.csv will be used for this assignment. The data set contains a random sample of 117 utility bills for the following variables.

  • month: month (coded as a number) 
  • day: day of month on which bill was calculated 
  • year: year of bill 
  • temp: average temperature (F) for billing period 
  • kwh: electricity usage (kwh) 
  • ccf: gas usage (ccf) 
  • thermsPerDay: a numeric vector 
  • billingDays: number of billing days in billing period 
  • totalbill: total bill (in dollars) 
  • gasbill: gas bill (in dollars) 
  • elecbill: electric bill (in dollars) 
  • notes: notes about the billing period
  • donate: (yes or no) did the person add money to their bill to be donated to Operation Fuel – a charity providing heat to families/small businesses in need?

Questions

R and Stata students: Import the Utilities.csv data set. SAS students: Load in the Utilities.sas7bdat file. Be sure to also read the codebook for the data set to familiarize yourself with the variables.

Question 1:  Make an appropriate graph to display the distribution of customer’s total bill. What best describes the distribution of customer’s total monthly bill?

Question 2: Make an appropriate graph to display gas bill by month. What month has the highest average gas bill?

Question 3: Make an appropriate graph to display electric bill by month. What month has the highest average electric bill?

Question 4: Make a graph to display the relationship between kwh usage and gas bill. Then, make a graph to display the relationship between kwh usage and electric bill. Does there appear to be a relationship between kwh and gas bill? Does there appear to be a relationship between kwh and electric bill?

Question 5: Make a graph to determine whether there is relationship between season and donation.

  • Start by making a new variable to categorize each bill into “season”. Have the variable equal winter if the bill was from December, January, or February. Have the variable equal spring if the bill was from March, April, or May. Have the variable equal summer if the bill was from June, July, or August. Have the variable equal fall if the bill was from September, October, or November.
  • Make a new variable DonorStatus and set equal to 1 if the billee donated money to Operation Fuel and 0 otherwise.
  • Now make a bar chart to display the proportion of donors by season.

Order the seasons from lowest proportion of donors to highest proportion of donors. Does there seem to be a relationship between season and donation?