Lab Exercises - Provide insights into relationships of measures within a complex data set

Exercise 1: What's up with Cichlid Eye Sizes?

Please use the data in CichlidEyeSizeCauses which contains information on the size of the eyes, body size and a few ecological variables.

cichlids = read.table("http://caspar.bgsu.edu/~courses/stats/Labs/Datasets/CichlidEyeSizeCauses.csv",sep=",",header=T)

A description of the data file can be found here. I am really interested in the size of the eye (with measures of its diameter in cichlids[,9]). First make friends with the data. The, can you please help me figure out whether size, lake, depth, sex, or feeding type may explain variation in eye size?

1. What can you tell me about independent and dependent variables?
2. What can you tell me about the relationships between eye size and each independent variable?
3. What is the correlational structure among independent variables?
4. What can you tell me about the determinants of eye size?
5. How can we include feeding type?

last modified: 10/28/2017