Project information

Density estimation: Psychological experiments

The data set n90pol.csv contains information on 90 university students who participated in a psychological experiment designed to look for relationships between the size of di erent regions of the brain and political views. The variables amygdala and acc indicate the volume of two particular brain regions known to be involved in emotions and decision-making, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex; more exactly, these are residuals from the pre- dicted volume, after adjusting for height, sex, and similar body-type variables. The variable orientation gives the students' locations on a ve-point scale from 1 (very conservative) to 5 (very liberal). Creating a 2-dimensional histogram for the pairs of variables (amygdala, acc) using kernel-density-estimation (KDE) to estimate the 2-dimensional density function of (amygdala, acc) with a simple multi-dimensional Gaussian kernel. The KDE estimator is used to verify whether or not the variables amygdala and acc are independent