Predicting health care charges of insurance beneficiaries (30 points). Health insurance companies often have to cover a sizable portion of the health care costs of their primary beneficiaries. Thus, it is of practical interest for these companies to predict the cost of medical bills from individual patient characteristics. In this problem, we will consider predicting the medical costs (or charges) in dollars for 𝑛 = 1338 primary beneficiaries

Predicting birthweight based on maternal risk factors (34 points). In this problem, we will consider predicting the birthweight (birthwt) of newborns in milligrams, using the age of the mother at the time of delivery (age), the weight of the mother at the last menstrual period (lwt) in kilograms, and the mother’s race (race)