Kick-off Event: Friday April 17th, 4-5pm, Kaneko Auditorium
All majors and skill levels are welcome.
Willamette University Data Science is hosting our sixth annual ASA DataFest. Since its inception at WU, our Datafests have brought together over 150 undergraduate students (from freshman to senior), mentors, and volunteers from eight schools, including: Willamette University, George Fox University, Linfield University, Reed College, Portland State University, Pacific University, Lewis and Clark College, and Oregon State University. This is a chance to bring together and grow the data science and statistics community in Oregon.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) has been having DataFest events across the country for over a decade. DataFest is a 48 hour data analysis competition, where undergraduate students work in teams (of 2-5 students) to gain insight on a large, rich, and complex dataset provided by a secret data sponsor.
This is a great opportunity to work with real world data, have fun with friends, and add an awesome experience to your resume.
Prizes awarded for: ● Best in Show / Best Insights ● Best Data Visualization ● Best Use of External Data ● Judges' Choice
Non-disclosure: Due to the competitive and sensitive nature of these data, please do not leak pictures, slides, materials, or information that provides clues or direct knowledge about the data source until May 4.
You can sign up as a team or individual. Individuals will be grouped together into teams for the event. Individuals may be grouped with other individuals from different institutions. What a great opportunity to meet other students! Efforts will be made to balance programming skill levels.
You can use any programming language or software that you desire! However, help and resources will be offered in R.
No; 48 hours is the upper bound of time for this competition. We encourage students to practice a healthy work-life balance and to take care of themselves.
Data will be shared with the teams via a Google Drive folder during the Kickoff event. Access to this folder will close before May 1. This Google Drive folder will contain the dataset as well as helpful resources. Datasets must be deleted from student computers after the competition.
The DataFest competition will take place in person. Google Drive with Google Docs is a good tool for virtual synchronous collaboration. If you wish to write together in LaTeX, Overleaf is a useful tool.
NOTE: Due to the competitive and sensitive nature of these data, you may not host these data or code in a publicly accessible place, such as GitHub or Rpubs.
Your team will prepare a brief (5-10 minute) presentation. You will present on the last day of the competition (Sunday), in front of a panel of judges.
We are looking for volunteers/mentors to help the students with brainstorming and even a little troubleshooting. Volunteers don’t need to be domain experts. Some programming and/or statistics knowledge would be helpful. We are also looking to recruit mentors to make short 5-minute mini-lessons/tutorials that can be pre-recorded or hosted on RPubs.