Maridon Romney

Term Project
2/21/2015
To better understand statistics, our class has compiled a project to analyse the colour ratio
of Skittles. We each purchased a bag, counted the colours and compiled the collective data. With
the data we plan to statistically determine which colours are more likely to be in any given bag of
Skittles. There are five colours in a regular package; Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, and Purple.

Let us first look at the data compiled by the whole class. Organised by the colours of the
Skittles themselves we see the distributional probability of each colour in a sample size of 2,635
Skittles found in 40 random packages of Skittles. The results for me were rather unexpected. I had
been under the impression that the popularity of certain colours would mean a higher number of
colours, especially since as we are about to see, my random bag of Skittles does not have such a
relatively equal amount of each colour.

Collective Class Data

700
560
420
280
140
0

513

25.862%

438 444 487 483

15.517%
27.586%

RED
Skittles
in My
Bag

10

ORANGE YELLOW GREEN

9

16

17.241%

PURPLE

total

15

58

13.793%

Shown above here is the data collected from my package of Skittles. As you can see it
differs slightly from that of the class averages. This data seems to suggest that Skittles
manufactures an even number of all the colours, however, the probability of which colours make
it into each package is perhaps more random. It seems to be that on a bag by bag basis, Skittles
is not very consistent, but overall things even out.

MEAN
Stand. Dv.

The distribution of the Skittles counted from bags seems to be

59.125
3.61

in a bell-shaped pattern skewed a little to the left. My bag would

Min

49

appear to be within normal range as it contained 58 candies inside of

Q1

57

it. When examining these data it is important to notice the different

Q2

60

Q3

62

Max

67

ways we can interpret and use them. On a quantitative level we might

be able to make a statistical guess of how many Skittles we are buying
when we purchase a bag.

Number of Candies in my Bag

58

Total Number of Bags

40

On a categorical level we might be able to make a guess of how many of each colour/
flavour will be inside that bag. When it comes to making quantitative guesses, histograms and
box plots are very useful in helping you to know the probability of how many skittles will be in your
random bag. Pie charts and Pareto charts are visually insightful to how many of each colour youll
be likely to get.
With the amount of data that we have there are a lot of different calculations we can make
and some of them do not help us to discern the two main probabilities we wanted to explore. As a
consumer we want to know how consistent a product is, and since we all have our favourite
flavours of skittles we want to know which colours well perhaps receive more of in each given
package. As such the equations that we used for this project, such as finding totals, means and
percentages were both simple and effective at finding exactly what we needed to know on both a
quantitative and categorical level.