The American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest 2024 @ Edinburgh is on site on March 22 - 24, 2024 weekend with participation from students from The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University.
What is DataFest?
Are you up for a data challenge? Want to mingle with data analysis professionals from industry and academia? Compete for prizes and glory?
ASA DataFest is a data analysis competition where teams of up to five undergraduate students attack a large, complex, and surprise dataset over a weekend. Your job is to represent your school by finding and communicating insights into these data. The teams that impress the judges will win prizes as well as glory for their school. Everyone will have a great experience, lots of food, and fun!
ASA DataFest is also a great opportunity to gain the experience that employers are looking for. Having worked on a data analysis problem at this scale will certainly help make you a good candidate for any position that involves analysis and critical thinking, and it will provide a concrete example to demonstrate your experience during interviews.
ASA DataFest at Edinburgh is organised by the University of Edinburgh (the School of Mathematics) and the Heriot-Watt University (the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences).
The organising committee members are Serveh Sharifi, Vanda Inacio, Ozan Evkaya, Amanda Lenzi, Neil Chada.
ASA DataFest 2024 Student Competition at Edinburgh
On 22-24 March, 82 students in 20 teams participated in the ASA DataFest 2024 at Edinburgh. Students were from 10 different schools across the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University. Academic staff, postgraduate students, and data scientists from industry joined as consultants to guide participants during the event.
The event was sponsored by the School of Mathematics, Actuarial Mathematics & Statistics Department at the Heriot-Watt University, Centre for Statistics, Maxwell Institute, Bayes Centre, International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and the Royal Statistical Society.
The data in this run of DataFest was from CourseKata. CourseKata is a platform that creates and publishes a series of e-books for introductory statistics and data science classes that utilize demonstrated learning strategies to help students learn statistics and data science. The developers of CourseKata are interested in improving statistics learning by examining students' interactions with online interactive textbooks. The challenge was to examine the data and make suggestions to help CourseKata improve the student experience of learning statistics.
Over the weekend participants worked together in the Hawthorn Teaching room at the Nucleus Building. They also spend time socialising with each other and data scientist consultants.
Our judges for this year’s DataFest 2024 @ EDI were,
Dr Bruce Worton - Reader in Statistics at the University of Edinburgh
Dr Daniel Paulin - Lecturer in Statistics and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh
Dr Solmaz Eradat - Data Engineer at industry
Riahn Holcomb - Statistician at Quantics
For this challenge, participants were asked to produce a 5-minute presentation of their analyses. Each presentation was reviewed by two judges then they had discussions to make final decisions on winners. Winners received prizes at the end of the event on Sunday evening including gift cards and free membership to the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society.
DataFest 2024 @ EDI Awards
Best Insight (joint award)
- Shepherd’s Pi Team (Markus Emmott, Jesse Olugbire, Alfie Plant) - “Impact of Early Chapters Engagement on Success”
- The 5 Yutes of Runity Team (Jack Taylor, Reuben Forman Ian Little, Arnesh Saha, Onno Sharp) - “Unveiling the Drivers of Academic Success, A Machine Learning Approach”
Best Visualisation (joint award)
Panic! At the Deadline Team (Owen Pauptit, Codrin Iftode, Ilhan Yeniada, Leo Jolly)
(Elena Tsai, Jiawu Wang, Joy Cao, Runlin Chen) - “The Impact of Video Watching on Student Performance and Experience in Online Learning”
Best Use of Outside Data
- I’m Feeling 22 Team (Tian Xia, Cara Hoggs, Christopher Dalziel)
- I’m Feeling 22 Team (Tian Xia, Cara Hoggs, Christopher Dalziel)
Judges’ pick, Honest and Sound Statistics
- Chameleons Team (Valtteri Vuorio, Sophie Grant, Wendy Deng)
- Chameleons Team (Valtteri Vuorio, Sophie Grant, Wendy Deng)