I thought I’d share my first assignment from the Coursera class, Data Analysis. It’s a very simple analysis, but it did get me back into the feel of writing research papers (as opposed to the terse sentence fragments I email at work). I’m posting it here to demonstrate what level of work you can expect from such a course… and because charts in R blow Excel out of the water.

Data Analysis Assignment 1 (Removing links due to plagiarism)

Figure 1 A plot of residuals from the original model relating interest rates and FICO score, colored by loan length. There is clear clustering in the residuals.

Figure 2 A plot of residuals from the original model relating interest rates and FICO score, colored by loan amount requested. There is clear clustering in the residuals.

Figure 3 A histogram of residuals from the original model, relating interest rates and FICO score, with a normal distribution overlay. The residuals are right skewed and do not show signs of normality.

Figure 4 A histogram of residuals from the adjusted model, relating interest rates with FICO score, loan length, and loan amount requested, with a normal distribution overlay. The residuals of the adjusted model appear better behaved than those of the original model, suggesting a better fit.