Smart Food- How many times an individual eats breakfast in a five-day week versus

current GPA?
By: Jena and Taylor
For our topic we chose how many times people eat breakfast in a five day span
compared to their current GPA. We thought these variables would be positively
correlated, meaning that the more students that consistently ate breakfast the higher their GPA
would be. We collected the data by asking 50 people at random in the library and this stats class.
We found our prediction was partially true because most people that ate breakfast everyday in
the five-day week had a GPA of 3.5 or higher; however, some of the GPAs were below a 3.5.
The explanatory variable in our study is the number of times a student ate breakfast out of a five
day week and this correlates with the response variable which is a student’s current GPA.
The scatter plot shows that our data set has weak positive correlation between the
amount of breakfast eaten and their current GPA because the dots are all scattered around the
line. The data points are spread out throughout the diagram, it isn’t perfectly in line with the
regression line. The correlation r for our data is 0.301 meaning that it had a low linear
relationship between students in ate breakfast regularly and their GPA. In addition, correlation r
was between 0-0.39 which means that is has a weak correlation to our data set. The x for our
data set is 3.54, which is the average of breakfast eaten in five days and our y is 3.618, which is
the average GPA of our data set. This means that the points 3.54 and 3.168 would be points in
the middle of our data set on the least squares regression line. The marginal change in our data
set is the slope of our in our data set. It also shows how the response variable, which was a
current student’s GPA changes when the explanatory variable (breakfast eaten in five days)
changes. The marginal change measures the instantaneous rate of change. When we included our
regression line to our scatter diagram it showed that our data points didn’t line up with the line.
Our marginal change is 0.0546, which means that every time breakfast was eaten the GPA went
up by 0.0546. Therefore, the correlation between eating breakfast and GPAs was weak because
most of our data points were off the line.
The influential points in our data set are the students who ate breakfast 10 times a week
with a GPA of 3.9 and the student who ate breakfast 5 times a week with a GPA of 2. The
significance of these points is that they pull our linear regression line one way or the other. These
points are influential because they were farthest away from our linear regression line.
We found that the coefficient of determination r² was 0.091, which shows it’s a positive
weak correlation similar to the correlation r. The amount of explained variation in our regression
is 9% and the unexplained regression is 91%. This tells us that 91% of our data was affected by
lurking variables. The lurking variables that exist that could affect the results of our study are the
amount of sleep, what they had for breakfast, the amount of time spent studying, etc could all
impact a student’s GPA.
An example of interpolation that isn’t in our current data set is someone who ate
breakfast 6 times. By plugging this number into our equation we can predict what their GPA
would be. When we plugged the numbers into the equation we found that someone who ate
breakfast 6 times in a five day period would have around a 3.75 GPA. However, for
extrapolation, if someone ate breakfast 15 times in a five day period their GPA would be a 4.24,
which is extremely high. Therefore, we can predict from that data that a person who ate breakfast
more often during the five day period would have a higher GPA than someone who didn’t eat
much or at all during the five days. However, we don’t know that this extrapolation for this
scenario is necessarily accurate because based on our scatter plot people who didn’t eat breakfast
still had a decent GPA and some people who did eat breakfast more than five times in the five
day period had a lower GPA than some people who didn’t eat breakfast.
Overall, our variable varied throughout our data set. Some people who ate breakfast
everyday during the five days had an average GPA of 3.5 or above, but some had a GPA below a
3.5. In addition, people who didn’t eat breakfast had GPAs that were around a 3.5 or higher.
Therefore, I wouldn’t say their GPA and how many times they eat breakfast is closely related
and their correlation is a weak positive which we can infer from the graph and r values. We had
previously thought that the correlation would have been a positive correlation.