Description
Problem 1 (50 points). In this problem, you are asked to write a report to summarize your
analysis of the popular “Auto MPG” data set in the literature. Much research has been done to
analyze this data set, and here the objective of our analysis is to predict whether a given car gets
high or low gas mileage based 7 car attributes such as cylinders, displacement, horsepower, weight,
acceleration, model year and origin.
(a) The “Auto MPG” data set is available at UCI Machine Learning (ML) Repository:
https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Auto+MPG
Download the data file “auto-mpg.data” from UCI ML Repository or from Canvas, and use Excel
or Notepad to see the data (this is a .txt file).
There are 398 rows (i.e., 398 different kinds of cars), and 9 columns (the car attributes and
name). Before we do any analysis, we need to clean the raw data. In particular, some values are
missing for this dataset. Many statistical methods have been proposed to deal with missing values,
and please conduct literature research by yourself.
For the purpose of simplicity in this homework,
here we adopt a simple though inefficient method to remove those rows with missing values. Also we
remove the last column of car names, which is text/string and may cause trouble in our numerical
analysis. These two deletions lead to a new cleaned data set of 392 observations and 8 columns.
To save your time, you can access the cleaned data from the file “Auto.csv” from Canvas and
the R code below if you save it in the local folder of your computer, say, “C:/Temp”:
Auto1 <- read.table(file = “C:/Temp/Auto.csv”, sep = “,”, header=T);
(b) Create a binary variable, mpg01, that contains a 1 if mpg contains a value above its median,
and a 0 if mpg contains a value below its median. You can compute the median using the median()
function. Note you may find it helpful to use the data.frame() function to create a single data
set containing both mpg01 and the other Auto variables.
mpg01 = I(Auto1$mpg >= median(Auto1$mpg))
Auto = data.frame(mpg01, Auto1[,-1]); ## replace column “mpg” by “mpg01”.
(c) Explore the data graphically in order to investigate the association between mpg01 and the
other features. Which of the other features seem most likely to be useful in predicting mpg01?
Scatterplots and boxplots may be useful tools to answer this question. Describe your findings.
(d) Split the data into a training set and a test set. Any reasonable splitting is acceptable, as
long as you clearly explain how you split and why you think it is reasonable. For your convenience,
you can either randomly split, or save every fifth (or tenth) observations as testing data.
(e) Perform the following classification methods on the training data in order to predict mpg01
using the variables that seemed most associated with mpg01 in (c). What is the test error of the
model obtained?
(1) LDA (2) QDA (3) Naive Bayes (4) Logistic Regression
(5) KNN with several values of K. Use only the variables that seemed most associated with
mpg01 in (c). Which value of K seems to perform the best on this data set?
(6) (Optional) PCA-KNN. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or other dimension
reduction methods can easily be combined with other data mining methods. Recall that the essence
of the PC-reduction is to replace the p-dimensional explanatory variable xi = (xi1, . . . , xip), for
i = 1, . . . , n, with a new p-dimensional explanatory variable ui = (ui1, . . . , uip), where ui = Ap×pxi
.
Then we can apply standard data mining methods such as KNN to the first r(≤ p) entries of the
ui
’s, (ui1, . . . , uir), to predict Yi
’s. Find the testing errors when the KNN with different values of
K (neighbors) is applied to the PCA-dimension-reduced data for different r = p − 1, p − 2, . . . , 1.
(7) (Optional) Any other classification methods you want to propose or use.
Write a report to summarize your findings. The report should include (i) Introduction, (ii)
Exploratory (or preliminary) Data Analysis, (iii) Methods, (iv) Results and (v) Findings.
Also see the guidelines on the final report of our course project. Please attach your computing code
for R or other statistical software (without, or with limited, output) in the appendix of your report,
and please do not just dump the computer output in the body of the report. It is important to
summarize and interpret your computer output results
