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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS

Sample Mid-semester Test

MATH3831
Statistical Methods for Social and
Market Research

(1) TIME ALLOWED – 50 minutes

(2) TOTAL NUMBER OF QUESTIONS – 3

(3) ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS

(4) THE QUESTIONS ARE NOT OF EQUAL VALUE

(5) TOTAL NUMBER OF MARKS – 100

(6) THIS PAPER MAY NOT BE RETAINED BY THE CANDIDATE

(7) ONLY CALCULATORS WITH AN AFFIXED “UNSW APPROVED” STICKER

MAY BE USED

All answers must be written in ink. Except where they are expressly required pencils
may only be used for drawing, sketching or graphical work.
Sample Mid-semester Test MATH3831 Page 2

1. [60 marks] Foresters want to estimate the average age of trees in a stand with
a total of 1132 trees. They randomly select 20 trees and measure their age by
counting the tree rings on cores taken from all these 20 trees. The data are
given in this table together with some summary statistics:
Tree No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Age (y) 135 129 93 95 109 127 79 143 164 178
Tree No. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Age (y) 71 90 124 157 132 116 92 98 107 109
P P 2
y = 2348, y = 291,264

a) [20 marks] Estimate the average age of trees in the stand and give a
standard error for the estimate.
b) [20 marks] Generally speaking, the older the tree, the large the param-
eter, and diameter is easy to measure. In the hope of improving their
estimate, the foresters measure the diameter of all 1132 trees and find
that the population mean equals 10.3. The diameters of the previous
sample trees are given below with some summary statistics:
Tree No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Diameter (x) 12.8 12.2 8.7 9.8 11.3 8.7 8.1 11 12.5 12.1
Tree No. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Diameter (x) 6.5 8.8 11.1 12.8 10.0 9.3 7.8 11.5 10.1 9.0
P P 2 P
x = 204.1, x = 2,146.39, xy = 24,739.8
Estimate the average age of trees in the stand using the ratio estimator
and give a standard error for the estimate.
c) [10 marks] Is the ratio estimator more efficient than the naı̈ve SRS
estimator in this specific example? Why is this to be expected? Answer
the second question with reference to the sample correlation between the
variables Age and Diameter and their coefficients of variation.
d) [10 marks] Estimate the average age of the trees in the stand using the
regression estimator and give a standard error for the estimate.

Please see over . . .

Sample Mid-semester Test MATH3831 Page 3

2. [30 marks] A population of 720 schools is divided into 3 strata (inner city,
suburban, rural). The total number of foreign students in these schools is of
interest. A stratified simple random sample of 40 schools is to be taken. From
the last census conducted one year ago, the following information is available,
Region number of schools standard deviation of the numbers of
foreign students in each school
Inner city 240 60
Suburban 400 40
Rural 80 20

a) [10 marks] Find the subsample sizes to be used in each stratum accord-
ing to Neyman’s optimal allocation method.
b) [10 marks] Give an estimate of the standard error of the resulting
estimate of the total number of foreign students in all the 720 schools if
the sample sizes were allocated using the Neyman allocation.
c) [10 marks] Estimate the total sample size that is required to achieve an
error bound of 6000 with 95% confidence in the above estimation, again
assuming that the Neyman allocation is used in allocating subsample
sizes (You can use z0.025 = 1.96).

3. [10 marks] In this question we follow the standard notation used in the lec-
tures: N , population size; y1 , . . . , yN , values
PN of the variable of interest2 for
1
each element in the population; Y = N i=1 yi , population mean; S =
1
PN 2
N −1 i=1 (yi − Y ) , population variance; n, sample size; S = {i1 , . . . , in } ⊂
{1, . . . , N }, aPsimple random sample (without replacement) from the popula-
1 1
tion; ȳ = n i∈S yi , the sample mean; s = n−1 i∈S (yi − ȳ)2 , the sample
2
P
variance.

a) [5 marks] Show that the variance of the naı̈ve estimator ȳ for the
population mean is  n1 2
var(ȳ) = 1 − S
N n
b) [5 marks] Show that the sample variance s2 is an unbiased estimator of
the population variance S 2 .