STA 363 Fall 2024

Take-Home Midterm Exam Instructions

Due: Saturday, September 7th, at 12 pm

Rules

  1. Your solutions must be written up in a Quarto (qmd) file and then rendered into an HTML file called exam-01.html. This file must include your code, output, and write-up for each question. Please use the head function when printing any result with over 20 rows.

  2. This exam is open-book, open-internet, closed to other people. You may use any online or book-based resource you would like, but you must include citations for any code you use (directly or indirectly). You may not consult anyone about this exam other than the Professor. You cannot ask direct questions online, or consult other students even for a hypothetical question.

  3. You will be required to upload the HTML file from your output. Technical difficulties are not an excuse for late work - do not wait until the last minute. Verify your HTML file includes all graphs and tables before uploading to Moodle. Use the embedded resources option in the YAML. If I have you to re-render, and resubmit, you will lose 5 points on the exam. Use the following YAML in your document so images are embedded:

---
title: "GIVE YOUR EXAM A TITLE"
author: "PLACE YOUR NAME"
format:
  html:
    embed-resources: true
---
  1. Your analysis’, outputs, and narratives, not your code, should answer the questions. I have enabled fold folding so your code will stay collapsed in your rendered documents.
  2. The in-class exam is worth 50 points. The take-home is worth 100 points.

Data

The data you will use for the exam is called BirdNest. It is found in the Stat2Data package and details can be found, once you have read in the package, with?BirdNest.

Research Question

How are the available variables related to the number of eggs in a nest for North American passerines?

Note: To fit some models, you can round (using the round function) the number of eggs to an integer.

Instructions

  1. Complete an exploratory data analysis
  2. Fit at least 3 appropriate models
  3. Assess each model; model conditions and any use limitations
  4. Compare the models and choose the best model
  5. Interpret a few key variable(s) of your best model using confidence intervals for the coefficients

Submission

When you are finished with your exam, be sure to Render the final document. Once rendered, you can download your file by:

  • Finding the .html file in your File pane (on the bottom right of the screen)
  • Click the check box next to the file
  • Click the blue gear above and then click “Export” to download
  • Submit your final html document to the exam spot on Moodle