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Data Sets

• "Portrait of the 1996 Electrorate"

  From "the New York Times on the web". We have put the data from the article here in a form more convenient for importing into a statistical package.

• 1994 Baseball Salaries

  A good example to show the difference between the mean and the median.

• Historical stock prices

  Historical stock prices are available at Yahoo. This page lets you look up ticker symbols. With these in hand you can use their Research Tools links to obtain historical quotes. The Dow data goes from Oct 1, 1928 to the present, S&P from Jan 3, 1950 to the present and Nasdaq from Oct 11, 1984 to the present. The ticker symbols for these are: ^DJI, ^SPC, and ^IXIC, respectively. Note that at the bottom of the results page you can elect to download your data in spreadsheet format. Here's what we got on January 30, 2002 for the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq.

  It is interesting to record whether the average went up or down and see if tests for streaks can show that it is not simple random walk with a drift. You can also check the random walk hypthesis by plotting 100*(ln(p(t+1)-ln(p(t))/d(t) where p(t) is the price at time t and d(t) is the number of days between time t and t+1.

• Quarterback Rating Data

  • NCAA Quarterback Passer Rating Data

  • NFL Quarterback Passer Rating Data
    
    

  Data provided by Roger Johnson relating to a standard method for rating quarterbacks. The variables that are used for the rating are known but the formula used is not and it is an interesting exercise to try to determine it by regression and check it with current quarterbacks.

• Oklahoma City media forcasts

  Data used by Harold Brooks in his paper Verification of public weather forecases for Oklahoma City.

• Abright Baseball Streak Study Data

  The data used in the article: "A Statistical Analysis of Hitting Streaks in Baseball, "Journal of American Statistical Association, Vol 88, No 424, pp 1175-1189, 1988. The data provides 26 bits of information on the situation and outcome for each time at bat for a large number of players in both the American and National league during the time period 1987-1990. It is compressed using zip for the PC but on the Mac you can unzip the files using, for example, Stuffit Delux.

• CEO Golf and Stock Data

  Data from New York Times (31 May 1998, Section 3, p 1) reporting correlation between CEO's golf handicaps and performance of their companies' stock. Reviewed in Chance News 7.06.

• Distribution of birthdays in U.S. in 1978

  This data gives the distribution of birthdays for births in the U.S. in 1978. It was used by Professor Geoffrey Berresford in his article: "The uniformity assumption in the birthday problem, Math. Mag. 53 1980, no. 5, 286-288." If you plot a times series of the data you will have a nice example of periodic data.

• Darts vs. The Experts

  The Wall Street Journal has a continuing contest between the darts and the experts. As of this time, Nov. 23, 1998, they have had 101 overlapping six month contests. A new contest is started every month. This data gives the percent gain for the average of the experts, the darts, and the Dow.

• Human Development Report

  Since 1990, the United Nations has provided this report. As described on the site: "Here you can access data from the Human Development Report (HDR) and resources to help you better understand these data. You will also find helpful information about the human development index and other indices, links to other background materials, data resources and on-going debates and discussions on human development statistics."