Shown here are the sales data (in $ millions) for U.S. furniture and home furnishing stores from 2012 through 2016 supplied by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using this data:

a. Construct a time-series graph of one year of these data. Looking at your graph, what are some of your insights and conclusions regarding this industry in that year?
b. Construct one graph that displays each of the five years’ data separately but in the same graph so that you can compare the five years. See Demonstration Problem 2.4.) What insights and/or conclusions might you reach about this industry now that you can see the five years in one graph?
c. Place the data together in order (perhaps one long column) and construct one graph (similar to part a) with all the data. Seeing one graph of all 60 data points lined up, what insights and understands can you gain that perhaps you didn’t see in part b?

Problem 2.4

The human resources manager for a large company commissions a study in which the employment records of 500 company employees are examined for absenteeism during the past year. The business analyst conducting the study organizes the data into a frequency distribution to assist the human resources manager in analyzing the data. The frequency distribution is shown. For each class of the frequency distribution, determine the class midpoint, the relative frequency, and the cumulative frequency.

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Furniture and Home Furnishings Stores Year Month 2012 2013 January 6866 7296 February 7169 7088 March 7787 7873 2014 2015 2016 7203 7974 8166 7227 7537 8363 8105 8647 9233 8298 8632 8934 8964 8613 9067 9147 9124 9174 9513 8983 9483 9110 9031 November 8259 8843 8949 9471 9967 December 9215 9197 10,228 10,891 10,966 April 6872 7312 May 7682 7831 June 7378 7556 July 7551 7979 August 8065 8463 8735 September 7438 7851 8371 October 7260 8060 8440 Year City Quarter Cleveland-Elyria, OH 7791 8385 7881 8403 2016 New Orleans-Metarie, LA Pittsburgh, PA San Diego-Carlsbad, CA San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA et 1 3 2174 2287 2170 Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI El Paso, TX 9968 11,004 10,758 6389 6848 6578 Hartford-W. Hartford-E. Hartford, CT 2730 2626 2306 5994 5604 7818 2014 1932 1780 4092 4516 4756 4543 5336 5706 6106 5009 5190 5587 5680 2017 4 1 2 3 4 2162 2194 2280 2227 2276 10,469 11,100 11,834 11,216 11,373 6677 6350 6626 6164 6714 2752 2235 2366 3247 2882 9737 8006 6611 7840 9279 2212 2281 2351 2205 2477 4706 4272 4603 4897 4849