Statistical Analysis on a Selected Data Set

Statistics is a useful tool for describing variability in data and for making informed decisions (Utts, 2017). Extracting practical information from data would be extremely difficult without having statistical knowledge. Testing of hypothesis and relationships between variables can also be analyzed by use of statistical techniques which determine whether or not there is statistical significance which is vital in many real-life fields. This paper will conduct a statistical analysis on the provided data set to identify the hospital closest to achieving the lowest cost per admission . 

Descriptive Statistics 

Analysis 

The table above shows descriptive statistics for the four hospitals surveyed; Hospital A, Hospital B, Hospital C and Hospital D. Hospital A has a mean of 12,966 and a standard deviation of 525.242. The standard deviation is the square root of the variance and it shows how much the total cost per hospital admission vary from the mean with a range (the difference between the largest and smallest value) of 1,515. The median was found to be 13,087.5. Hospital B has a mean of 12,752.833 with a standard deviation of 662.585. In addition to this, the median is given as 12,765 and the total admission cost in Hospital B given as 153,034. Taking a look at Hospital C , the mean was found to be 12,926.583 with a standard deviation of 671.375. This implies that on average the total cost of hospital admission in Hospital C will be approximately 12,927 dollars. The difference between the highest admission cost and the lowest admission cost is 2,308 dollars which is the highest difference of the four hospitals. The total cost of admission in Hospital C was found to be 155,119 dollars. Hospital D has a mean of 12,868.08 with a standard deviation of 394.2601. The total cost of admission in Hospital D was found to be 154,417 dollars. 

Conclusion 

The findings of this survey reveal that Hospital B is the closest hospital to achieving the lowest cost per admission with a mean cost of admission of about 12,753 dollars. Hospital D came in second as the hospital with the cheapest admission cost of 12,868 dollars followed by Hospital C with an average cost of approximately12,927 dollars. Hospital A is the most expensive hospital to visit with an average cost of 12,966 dollars. The other useful data elements that researchers could collect are Skewness and Kurtosis to measure the symmetry of data and to check the distribution of the data respectively. 

Reference

Utts, J. (2017).  The Importance of Statistics Education .  Ics.uci.edu . Retrieved 19 August 2017, from http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts