statistics project (using R)

The data come from a study on childhood obesity. Pregnant mothers were enlisted and then each child was followed from birth to two years old. The researchers that collected this data were interested in understanding childhood obesity and especially what role (if any) the human microbiome plays. The human microbiome refers to the different bacteria that live inside/on humans. The following variables are available.

• id: id of subject

• weight_born: weight at birth (in kg)

• height_born: height at birth (in cm)

• weight_2yr: weight at 2 years

• height_2yr: height at 2 years

• child_buccal_fb: Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratio in the child’s mouth. These are two phyla of

  bacteria. The ratio of their abundences are thought to play an important role in obesity.

• child_gut_fb: Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratio in the child’s gut.

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• mom_buccal_fb: Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratio in the mother’s mouth.

• child_buccal_alpha: Alpha diversity of types of bacteria in the child’s mouth. The alpha diversity is a

  summary of how diverse the types of bacteria are (i.e. are there lots of different types of bacteria).

• child_gut_alpha: Alpha diversity in the child’s gut.

• mom_buccal_alpha: Alpha diversity in the mother’s mouth.

• Treatment: There were two treatments as part of this study, with labels “Safety” and “Parenting”.

  “Safety” refers to the control group, while “Parenting” means the treatment group where the parents received nutritional training.

• Antibiotic: Did the child receive antibiotics in the first two years.

• Gender: Gender of the child.

  Your goal is to play the role of the statistician in this study and analyze the data. You should clearly detail everything that you do in your report. IN ADDITON: you are to apply one tool from outside this class. It can be from another class (that we didn’t discuss), the book, or just random searching. You should also breifly describe this tool and why you think it is interesting to apply to this data.