Economic Statistics 1-1 Neşe Yildiz

Problem Set 3
This problem set was prepared by Viviane Sanfelice

Due Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2019 beginning of class.

Note that the hints are for Excel, but you are NOT required to use Excel to do this
homework.

1. In this problem set you are expected to summarize some crime data graphically. We
saw in class how to construct graphs in order to summarize and display information
from a dataset. In class we studied temporal data about several types of criminal
offenses in the city of Chicago. In this problem set we are going to look at a more
specific type of crime: homicides. The data, again, come from the Chicago Police
and are records by police districts about homicides that have occurred in the city
from 2001 to 2016.
Data source: data.cityofchicago.org
For your information: Chicago Police is divided in 22 districts according to the
picture below.

Note: The orange dots represent police stations location and the colors repre-
sent police administrative areas, classified as North Area (darker gray), Central
Area (light gray) and South Area (medium gray).
Figure 1: Police districts - city of Chicago
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a) Basing your answer on the available data, do you agree with the following state-
ment: “Overall in the city of Chicago, number of homicides in 2016 was higher
than it was fifteen years ago, in the beginning of 2000’s.” Explain your answer.

b) Construct a histogram with homicides records in 2006 and a histogram with

homicides records ten years later, in 2016. Compare the two histograms.

c) Using a bar or pie chart investigate if there are geographical differences in homi-
cides. (Hint: Select a specific year, for instance, 2016 and work with crime by Area.)

d) Merge the data from the sheet “table charac. pop district” onto the main data
sheet (Hint: use the formula VLOOKUP).
Once you have done that, select only data for 2016 and construct a cross tabulation
of income per capita (range: less than $17,000, $17,001-$34,000, more than $34,000)
versus number of homicides (range: less than 25, from 26 to 50, from 51 to 75, and
more than 75).
Interpret the table you have just constructed.

e) Still using the merged data and only data for 2016, construct a scatter plot
to explore the relationship between number of homicides and unemployment rate.
What does this scatter diagram tell you?

f) Construct a time series graph with number of homicides by area over the years.
The x axis should have the years and the y axis should have the number of homi-
cides. (Hint: First combine the data by area and year in a pivot table, then create
the graph.)

g) The graph below is not necessarily wrong, but it may not be quite informative.
You can watch the video about some misleading graphs to answer this question.
http://www.statisticshowto.com/misleading-graphs
What do you believe to be the problem(s) with this graph?
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h) EXTRA QUESTION - This item will not be graded.

In the website http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations there are several
examples of spurious correlations.
Could you find an outside variable that may have a spurious correlation with
temporal series of homicides in Chicago?