Ice Cream Eaten in a Week

By: Grace and Taylor

For our project, we chose to collect data on how many times people eat ice cream in a
week. It could be any kind of ice cream products such as: ice cream, milk shakes, flurries, etc.
We asked 50 people from the statistics class, calculus class, and the library until we got to 50.
After we arranged our data from least to greatest, we found that there were a lot more people
who ate ice cream not at all or once per week. However, some of them said it also depended on
the time of year it was how much ice cream they ate because people said they tend to eat more
ice cream on hot days or special occasions. So that was taken into account as well, but we
wanted to know in general how much ice cream people eat.
While collecting our data, Grace and I noticed that the majority of people ate ice cream
either not at all or once a week. However, when we found the mode, the results showed that 17
out of 50 people ate ice cream once per week compared to 16 people who said they didn’t eat ice
cream at all during the week. This means that more people ate ice cream once a week than any of
the numbers we collected.In addition, when calculating the median we also found that the
halfway point was one. Lastly, when adding all the numbers together and dividing by 50 we
found that the mean was 1.72. This shows that on average if we rounded up to a whole number,
most people eat ice cream twice per week. However, when calculating our trimmed means we
found that they decreased. The five percent trimmed mean, which was found by multiplying .05
by the mean which was 1.72 resulted in 1.3. The ten percent trimmed mean, which was found by
multiplying .10 by 1.72 was 1.2. This means that when the top and bottom numbers of the data
set were taken out, the means changed, but not greatly. All of these data sets are still very close
in numbers because more than a quarter of our data had people eating ice cream once per week,
which affects the mean and median. However, the range is significantly bigger than the other
values by 11 because the highest amount of ice cream eaten in a week was 12. The lowest
amount was 0, as a result, when subtracting these two numbers together 12 was the range. This
shows how much our data was dispersed.
When Taylor and I were surveying students, it became obvious that many students did
not eat ice cream regularly. We found our variance from calculating the sum of our results minus
our sample mean (1.72) squared divided by the amount of our data (50) subtracted by 1. Our
variance ended up being 5.68. This showed us that some data points were far from our average
amount, which was 1.72. This makes sense because we had data points as high as 8, 9, and 12,
while most points were below 2. We found the standard deviation by taking the square root of
the variance (5.68). This gave us a standard deviation of 2.38. Our standard deviation shows us
that most of the values in our data set were close to the mean of our data set, which makes sense
because most students did not eat ice cream regularly throughout the week. Our coefficient of
variation was calculated by dividing our variance (5.68) by our mean (1.72) and multiplying that
by 100. This calculation gave us the coefficient of variation of 138.37. Because we had outliers
that were far from the mean, median, and mode of our data, our coefficient of variation was a
very high value. These outliers included 5,8,9, and 12. Our data was very dispersed, which
resulted in our coefficient of variation being large.
When finding the Chebyshev Interval in our data set we had to calculate the standard
deviation subtracted from numbers 2, 3, or 4 multiplied by the mean. We found that 75% of our
data fell between -3.94 to 7.38, 88.9% fell between -6.77 to 10.21, 93.8% fell between -9.6 to
13.04. These numbers show where our data values fell out of 75%, 88.9%, and 93.8%. The
numbers vary quite a bit because when calculating the numbers the constants were different.

Our box and whisker plot shows us that our minimum and lower quartile are the same
number. The minimum and lower quartile of our data was both the value of 0. This results from a
large number of participants eating no ice cream in an average week. Our third quartile value is
2, which is also a low number from a lack of people eating ice cream regularly. Our box and
whisker plot also shows us that the maximum of 12 was very high compared to a majority of the
data. The maximum is 12 times the amount of our median. This shows us that although most
students that we surveyed do not eat ice cream on the average week, there are a few students that
eat ice cream multiple times a day. By subtracting our Q3 by our Q1 (2-0), we found our IQR
which is 2. When we multiplied our IQR by 1.5, we got 3. This showed us that any amount that
was 3 less than our Q1 (0) and 3 more than our Q3 (2) was an outlier. This calculation resulted in
the data values of 5, 8, 9, and 12 being outliers.