John Verzani
Using NHANES III data to create growth charts
The CDC publishes growth charts based on NHANES III data at
http://www.cdc.gov/GrowthCharts/. In addition to the charts, there are
some educational materials (including SAS code which I haven't looked
at).
This project would demonstrate to students:
-
various skills needed for working with large, government-style,
data sets, including: working with data in fwf format, data cleaning,
possibly using a data base for storage.
(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/nh3data.htm#NHANES%20III%C2%A0%20Series%2011,%20No.%201
)
- Allow students to look at various rubrics to predict adult height
such as the doubling of height at 2 years.
- explore model building for this data. This data shows how the
simple linear model is not sufficient, how using polynomial models can
fit the data, and how modeling of the quantiles is more natural. For
this, the quantreg package is available. The paper http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/growth/growth.html
gives background material for the use in this context.