What is the average selling price of a home? The Data and Story Library (DASL) contains data, including the sale price, for a random sample of 117 homes sold in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Go to the DASL website (lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/) and retrieve the home price data set (lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/Datafiles/ homedat.html.) Use MINITAB, Excel, or MegaStat to produce appropriate graphical (histogram, stem-and-leaf, box plot) and numerical summaries of the price data. Identify, from your numerical summaries, the sample mean and standard deviation. Use these summaries to construct a 99% confidence interval for p, the mean sale price. Use statistical software (MINITAB, Excel, or
MegaStat) to compute a 99% confidence interval for p. Do the results of your hand calculations agree with those from your statistical software?
Technical note: There are many ways to capture the home price data from the DASL site. One simple way is to select just the rows containing the data values (and not the labels), copy, paste directly into an Excel or MINITAB worksheet, add your own variable labels, and save the resulting worksheet. It is possible to copy the variable labels from DASL as well, but the differences in alignment and the intervening blank line add to the difficulty.