Past Midterm Questions
Question #1:
A colleague is interested in
evaluating a new image-processing algorithm. Your colleague is
particularly interested in the time required to process images of
a certain size (i.e. 1152 x 864 pixels). Image-processing times
are known to be normally distributed. The population parameters
for processing times of images of this size are:
- Mean: 400
milliseconds
- Standard deviation:
60 milliseconds
- Given the population
parameters above, complete the following:
- What proportion
of processing times would you expect to be
between 440 milliseconds and 540 milliseconds.
- What time
corresponds to the 40th percentile.
- Your colleague
tests the algorithm on a particular image and
discovers that the processing time is 508
milliseconds. Is this time slower than the 95th
percentile? Justify your answer.
- Let y denote
image-processing times. Given the population parameters
above and considering the sampling distribution of ybar,
complete the following. Make any necessary assumptions.
- What proportion
of samples of size n=17 would you expect to have
mean processing times less than 370 milliseconds.
- Considering
samples of size n=8 and samples of size n=64,
comment on the following statement. Justify your
answer.
The proportion of
samples with mean processing time within three standard
deviations of the mean is the same for samples of size
n=8 as for samples of size n=64.
Question #2:
You are a Y2K consultant and
have been asked by the new director of application development at
a large company to investigate the cost to fix
the Y2K problem. You select a sample of 18 programs
from the portfolio of programs and determine the
cost, per line of code, to fix each program. You discover
that the sample mean is $2.60 with a standard deviation of $0.90.
- Provide
estimates of the population mean and standard deviation.
- Given your estimates of the
population parameters, and assuming cost per line of code is normally
distributed, answer the following:
-
Determine the proportion of programs in the portfolio
that you expect to cost more than $2.60 per line of code
to fix.
- Would you expect any
of the programs in the portfolio to cost
more than $6.00 per line of code to fix? Justify your
answer.