Flu Medication and Blood Pressure Side-Effect Assessment

IT Assessment Task

(i) In a certain part of a city, the need to buy drugs is known to be responsible for 68% of all thefts. What is the probability that three of the next four thefts are due to the need for drugs?

(ii) Use the information from above (i) to answer this question. Provide a bar plot that shows the probabilities for zero, one, two, three and four thefts being due to drugs? The plot should be worthy of use in a report.

(iii) The probability that a patient recovers from a lymphoma is 0.4. If 14 people are known to have this disease, what is the probability that either 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 of these people will survive?

(iv) Use the information from above (iii) to answer this question. Provide a bar plot that shows the probabilities for each number of possible survivors? The plot should be worthy of use in a report.

(v) Generate a Poisson approximation to (iv). Provide a comparative plot for this approximation? Make use of a legend in your comparative plot and make this graph worthy of use in a report. Describe the closeness of the distributions and provide an explanation of the result? Use no more than a total of five sentences.

2. Flu medication and blood pressure side-effect (1 + 2 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 10)
A new medication had been designed to reduce the chance of obtaining the flu. However it is suspected that the medication has a side effect of increasing the blood pressure of its consumer. To examine this suspicion an experiment was designed and necessary data collected. Your task is to analyse this data.

Use the question_2.csv file to answer the above question. This file contains records of before and after blood pressure and the type of medication used. The variables contained in the file
are:

• medicationType: the type of medication taken by the participant:
• either the active drug (the flu medication being examined)
• or a Placebo (a control, containing no medication / drug)
• bloodPressure_before: blood pressure of the participant before receiving the medication
• bloodPressure_after: blood pressure of the participant after receiving the medication

Use the following steps to determine the effect of the medication on the participants’ heart rate.

(i)
Compute the "mean after medication blood pressure" for those that received the medication and the "mean after medication blood pressure" for those that received the placebo. Also produce a boxplot for "after medication blood pressure", with respect to the two medications used? Make sure the boxplot is worthy of use in a report.

(ii)
Using the above results (i), does the active drug appear to increase blood pressure? Is there a flaw in the approach used to make this judgement, if so, how could it have been avoided? Your response must consist of no more than six simple sentences.