From left: Arizona Chapter officers Jie (Jane) Pu, Yongzhao Peng, Shuo Jiang, and Rodney Jee; district vice chair Ji-Hyun Lee; and Jennifer Broatch of ASU-West Campus

The Arizona Chapter concluded its first ASA DataFest competition on March 25 with excellent participation from students of Arizona State University’s Tempe and West campuses. A total of 15 teams comprised of 49 students finished the weekend-long competition.

Referred to as a data hackathon, ASA DataFest challenges undergraduates to analyze a large data set from industry over a weekend and present their results before judges.

Many of the students began learning R for the competition, but at least one of the teams relied heavily on their training in SAS for their data preparation and analyses. Visualization was one of the judging criteria, yet teams were seen learning to use a commercial package like Tableau on the spot for their analyses and presentations. A few teams ventured into building quick models, ranging from logistic regressions, to time series, to machine learning. Clearly, many of the students took up the challenges and used the competition as a way to strengthen their technical skills while conducting data analyses.

More than 30 mentors signed up to help the students overcome DataFest’s challenges. Most of the mentors were graduate students and faculty at ASU, but members of the Arizona Chapter saw many data professionals from local business and industry participating, too.

An attempt was made to find mentors who could help with specific languages or software tools and such effort was not wasted. Python and Tableau experts were announced upon arrival and immediately found teams seeking assistance in applying those tools to their analyses.

The competition finished Sunday afternoon with student presentations of their key findings. The ASU site was fortunate to have a representative of the data donor among the panel of five judges. A senior analyst from the health care sector provided another perspective on judging. ASA members Steve Robertson of Southern Methodist University, John Stufken of ASU, and Ji-Hyun Lee of The University of New Mexico rounded out the panel. Lee, who is also the current Council of Chapters district vice chair, not only judged, but also was present for the entire event. Besides working with the students, she took time to talk with members about the needs and opportunities for leadership roles in the chapters and ASA.