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Plotting the engine size of the cars, in cubic centimetres (CC), against
miles per gallon, gives us:
You’ll notice
there appear to be
less points on
the graph than
there are entries
in the table, but
some data simply
overlaps, either
due to the cars
being similar or
being the same
car entered
multiple times.
From a quick
glance, it
appears that
larger engines
tend to give
inferior fuel
efficiency,
though we can do
better than
simple visual
analysis. Using the CORR procedure, we can get an exact value for a
correlation between the two variables. Using the Pearson correlation
calculation, we see a correlation of around -0.7 (1d.p.) between engine
size and fuel efficiency. This is a respectable correlation and shows
there is some relation of note between fuel efficiency and engine size – a
larger engine will lead to less miles per gallon of fuel. Though, I would
like to remind everyone that correlation is not necessarily causation, and
there could be other factors not yet examined at work.
We can take this data further to