CASE STUDY

World's Richest People

Each year, Forbes magazine publishes a list of the world's richest people. In 2013, over 50 reporters worked to compile Forbes's 27th anniversary "World's Billionaires" rankings. To estimate net worth, Forbes values individual assets and accounts for debt. Assets include stakes in public and private companies, real estate, yachts, art, and cash.

The magazine includes wealth belonging to a person's immediate relatives provided that the wealth can ultimately be traced to one living individual. In those cases "& family" is added to indicate that the net worth given includes money belonging to more than one person. From the Forbes article, we constructed the following table showing the 25 richest people (out of 1426 on the complete list), as of March 2013.

1. For each of the five columns of the table, classify the data as either qualitative or quantitative; if quantitative, further classify it as discrete or continuous.
2. Create a frequency and relative frequency table for the citizenship data.
3. Construct and interpret either a pie chart or a bar chart for the citizenship data.
4. Organize the age data into frequency and relative frequency tables, using bins of size 10.
5. Construct a frequency or relative frequency histogram, based on your table in part (d).
6. Identify and interpret the (rough) shape of your histograms in part (e) in terms of modality, symmetry, and skewness. Feel free to do this by hand and take a picture, use Excel, or use some other form of technology.
7. Each week, we are going to cover topics in statistics or probability that may have some additional meaning for you. Provide an example of how one or more of this week’s topics are relevant to your life, work, or degree program.

Solution: (a) Rank = Ordinal data. Quantitative and discrete

Name = Nominal Data. Qualitative

Age = Ratio Data. Quantitative and discrete (it is presented as discrete, but the exact number of years is continuous).

Citizenship = Nominal Data. Qualitative

Wealth = Ratio data. Quantitative and continuous.

(b) We get:

(c) The following pie chart is obtained:

We can observe that a very large majority of the world's richest people are from United States.

(d) The following frequency table is obtained:

(e) The following histogram of frequencies is obtained:

(f) The modes of age are 65, 73 and 77years, and in this histogram above, the modal class is 69 - 78. The distribution does not look symmetric and indeed, it looks slightly skewed left.

(g) One topic of my interest is forecasting, which by I have been reading can be tackled using regression.

Price: $7.1

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 4 pages, 310 words and 5 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document