ASA DataFest 2024 Student Competition at Edinburgh

The American Statistical Association DataFest is an annual data analysis competition where teams of up to five undergraduate students work on analysing a surprise dataset provided by the ASA that is large and complex.

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.

For this challenge, participants were asked to produce a 5-minute presentation of their analyses.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.

Each presentation was reviewed by two judges then they had discussions to make final decisions on winners. Our judges for this year's DataFest 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).

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.

Many congratulations to the winning teams!

Best Insight (joint award): Shepherd's Pi Team

Markus Emmott, Jesse Olugbir, Alfie Plant

Best Insight (joint award): The 5 Yutes of Runity Team

Jack Taylor, Reuben Forman, Ian Little, Arnesh Saha, Onno Sharp

Best Visualisation (joint award): Panic! At the Deadline Team

Owen Pauptit, Codrin Iftode, Ilhan Yeniada, Leo Jolly

Best Visualisation (joint award)

Elena Tsai, Jiawu Wang, Joy Cao, Runlin Chen

Best Use of Outside Data: 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

The organising committee members this year were: Serveh Sharifi, Vanda Inacio, Ozan Evkaya, Amanda Lenzi, and Neil Chada.

Congratulations to all involved!