OCR MEI S3 2006 June — Question 4

Exam BoardOCR MEI
ModuleS3 (Statistics 3)
Year2006
SessionJune
TopicWilcoxon tests

4 A company has many factories. It is concerned about incidents of trespassing and, in the hope of reducing if not eliminating these, has embarked on a programme of installing new fencing.
  1. Records for a random sample of 9 factories of the numbers of trespass incidents in typical weeks before and after installation of the new fencing are as follows.
    FactoryABCDEFGHI
    Number before installation81264142241314
    Number after installation6110118101154
    Use a Wilcoxon test to examine at the \(5 \%\) level of significance whether it appears that, on the whole, the number of trespass incidents per week is lower after the installation of the new fencing than before.
  2. Records are also available of the costs of damage from typical trespass incidents before and after the introduction of the new fencing for a random sample of 7 factories, as follows (in £).
    FactoryTUVWXYZ
    Cost before installation1215955464672356236550
    Cost after installation12681105784802417318620
    Stating carefully the required distributional assumption, provide a two-sided \(99 \%\) confidence interval based on a \(t\) distribution for the population mean difference between costs of damage before and after installation of the new fencing. Explain why this confidence interval should not be based on the Normal distribution.