DISTANCE TO MANHATTAN

            I hoped that distance to Manhattan would correlate because I thought that there was a possibility that the closer a community was to the city, which has very high AIDS rates, the greater the chance they would encounter the risk factors involved in big city lifestyle. This was untrue at 95% confidence, as the correlation was -0.24 . By looking at the scatterplot, it is clear that the outliers are Dover at 32 miles, Montclair at 27 miles, and Parsippany at 25 miles, as these communities are farthest in miles from the city.  Dover and Parsippany have fairly low AIDS rates at 174 and 384 respectively, which corresponds with my hypothesis that the farther away a town is from Manhattan, the lower the AIDS rate. Montclair which is 13 miles from Manhattan, however, has a high (though not the highest by any means) AIDS rate of 824.  When these three data points are removed, the correlation then becomes 0.533, which is significant at 95% confidence. 

Graph Before Outliers Removed:                                                            Graph After Outliers Removed:

 

 

Town/County

Distance to Manhattan

AIDS Rate per 100,000

Bloomfield/ Essex County

12

386

Clifton/ Passaic County

12

253

Dover/ Morris County

32

174

East Orange/ Essex County

13

3070

Englewood/ Bergen County

8

536

Irvington/ Essex County

15

2059

Hackensack/ Bergen County

8

399

Montclair/ Essex County

13

839

Morristown/ Morris County

27

442

Newark/ Essex County

12

3398

Orange/ Essex County

14

1795

Parsippany/ Morris County

25

348

Passaic/ Passaic County

10

764

Paterson/ Passaic County

14

1418

Teaneck/ Bergen County

8

425

Correlation Coefficient

-0.21257695 (0.533318251 without outliers)

 

 

*outliers in bold

 

                      

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