October 20, 2004
Stata 2
Due Thursday, 11/4.
The Stata dataset website.dta records visits to www.econmodel.com over a
48 weeks period. Your assignment is to produce a report analyzing traffic at this web site.
To get started, click on the link above with your right mouse button. Choose "Save Target As". Save the file someplace where you can find it later. Start Stata 8. Choose the menu option "File | Open". Go find website.dta, and load it into Stata.
Once you have website.dta loaded, start "getting to know your data." Look at the raw data in the data editor. Generate some summary statistics. Make some graphs.
If you generate any transformed data, it is a very good idea to save your changed data in a new dataset using "File | Save As". If you make a mistake or if you just make a mess, you can then go back to the original data.
The variables are as follows:
day, month, year are the calendar date. dayofweek is 1 for Sunday through 7 for Saturday. week is 1 through 48.
visits is the number of different IP addresses that requested pages from the web site during a given day. pages is the number of web pages requested during a given day. hits is the number of files requested during a given day. The number of hits is typically much greater than the number of pages because each graphic element on a page is a different file. bandwidth is the number of megabytes requested during a given day.
For this assignment you will turn in a report with the following sections:
1. Introduction
2. Data Description (define your variables and transformations)
3. Empirical Results
4. Conclusions
You will focus on visits, but may also work with pages. You should check for the existence of the following patterns in the data and measure the magnitude of each effect.
1. Day of the week.
2. Growth over time using monthly figures.
3. Special days of the year.
4. Relation to the typical U.S. academic calendar.
What I am looking for is a few pages where you demonstrate that you can put together descriptive statistics and graphs. Think of yourself as a $100 per hour statistical consultant getting paid to analyze traffic at this web site so that the owner can plan for next year. At that pay grade, lots of charts and graphs are important to impress the client.
Ideas for Stata 2
The "visits" data for Stata 2 shows a seasonal pattern and a day-of-week pattern.
Can you see these patterns better in the original data, summary statistics tables, or this graph?
How about visits over week? Does this work better than visits by week? Is it clearer for some purposes than the line graph? Could you make the labels for the bars a little more professional?
Can you find the summer and Christmas in this graph?
Does it look like this spring is showing more visits than last spring?
If this were a business, how could you use statistics to understand the patterns in the data? Why would a business want to understand the patterns in the number of visits to their web site?