2014 NBA Salaries

The data frame NBA in the snippet below contains data on all of the NBA players from the 2014 season. The salary numbers are in millions of dollars.

NBA = read.csv("http://people.hsc.edu/faculty-staff/blins/spring17/math222/data/NBASalaries2014.txt")
head(NBA)

##   firstname  lastname         team conference   salary
## 1       Joe   Johnson BrooklynNets    eastern 23.18079
## 2     Deron  Williams BrooklynNets    eastern 19.75446
## 3     Brook     Lopez BrooklynNets    eastern 15.71900
## 4     Kevin   Garnett BrooklynNets    eastern 12.00000
## 5   Jarrett      Jack BrooklynNets    eastern  6.30000
## 6     Mirza Teletovic BrooklynNets    eastern  3.36810

East = subset(NBA,conference == "eastern")
West = subset(NBA,conference == "western")
mean(East$salary)-mean(West$salary)

## [1] -0.0001861654

Because this is data from the whole population, there is no need to use statistical inference to give us information about salaries, we can just calculate the relevant parameters directly.

\[\mu_{eastern}-\mu_{western} = -\$186.17.\]

Exercises

1. Does the salary data have any outliers? How can you tell?

2. Make histograms to display the distributions of salaries for both conferences. What do you notice?