Brennan Bean, Utah State University Data Analytics Club President

Members of the Utah State University (USU) Data Analytics Club, an ASA student chapter, had the opportunity to work with ASA President-elect Wendy Martinez during her visit to the USU campus in Logan, Utah, in February of 2019. Together, they reviewed code submissions from Data Challenge 2016 at JSM in Chicago. Data challenge participants analyzed and visualized vehicle crash data provided by the US Department of Transportation.

Students from Utah State’s ASA Student Chapter work with ASA president-elect, Wendy Martinez, to review code submissions from Data Challenge 2016 at JSM in Chicago. From left are Wendy Martinez, Angie Merritt, Eric McKinney, Kristi Reutzel, Jill Lundell, and Brennan Bean. Not pictured: Chris Jones.

The goal of the USU Data Analytics Club was to ensure that each participant’s analyses and visualizations were fully reproducible prior to their publication in Computational Statistics. Club members formed teams to download and run project scripts. Each team attempted to reproduce the described analyses and visualizations and commented on the quality and reproducibility of the ensuing results.

Students were able to identify elements in the various submissions that were easy to follow as outside viewers. The experience taught participating students powerful lessons about the “why” and “how” of reproducible research. Creating reproducible workflows are critical as rapid advancements in statistical software occasionally necessitate updates to old analyses. One student chapter member, Jill Lundell, said, “Reviewing code for the 2016 Data Expo was a great learning experience. Seeing what the participants did well and where they could improve helped me better organize my own code for sharing. I also picked up a few coding tricks.”

In addition to learning best practices for reproducible research, the experience provided students the opportunity to interact with and learn from Martinez. Student chapter member Eric McKinney said, “Being with Wendy was a delight. She possesses years of experience and statistical prowess, yet she thrills to share it and empower others. It was an honor to meet her.”

The USU Data Analytics Club meets regularly throughout the academic year. Meetings primarily consist of students helping other students learn and apply the tools of analytics through presentations, code sharing, and workshops. Specific examples of club meetings include a presentation on developing R packages, a workshop on developing websites using the blogdown package in R, and an illustrated implementation of deep learning for image recognition in Python. For details regarding club meetings, email the USU Data Analytics Club.