Chapter 17, Problem 4PS

The owner of a moving company typically has his most experienced manager predict the total number of labor hours that will be required to complete an upcoming move. This approach has proved useful in the past, but the owner has the business objective of developing a more accurate method of predicting labour hours. In a preliminary effort to provide a more accurate method, the owner has decided to use the number of cubic feet moved, the number of large pieces of furniture, and whether there is an elevator in the apartment building as the independent variables and has collected data for 36 movers in which the origin and destination were within the borough of Manhattan in New York City and the travel time was an insignificant portion of the hours worked. The data are organized and stored in Moving.

a. Using all the data as the training sample, develop a regression tree model to predict the labor hours.

b. What conclusions can you reach about the labor hours?