Vittorio Addona, Macalester College; Kelly McConville, Reed College; and Joseph Nolan, Northern Kentucky University

The co-chairs of the Undergraduate Statistics Project Competition (USPROC) organizing committee announce the winners for the fall 2018 submission cycle. In the two categories of the Undergraduate Statistics Class Project Competition (USCLAP), the winners are the following:

Introductory Statistics Competition

1st Place: Johanna Emmanuel, Ian McNamara, and Sophie Kleinheksel of Hope College for “The Effect of Music on Memory Tasks”
Faculty Sponsor: Yew-Meng Koh

2nd Place: Michael Miller and Christopher Anderson of Skidmore College for “Global Suicidality: Indicators in Substance Abuse”
Faculty Sponsor: Julie A. Douglas

3rd Place: Carter Morfitt, Nick Harrison, Cory Leigh, and Durante Rodriguez of Western Washington University for “Predicting Park Visitation in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area in Minnesota Using Geolocated Social Media Data”
Faculty Sponsor: Kimihiro Noguchi

3rd Place: Benjamin Siegel of the United States Military Academy at West Point for “Does Money Buy Happiness?”
Faculty Sponsor: Dusty Turner

Honorable Mention: Kathleen Newman and Thomas Williams of the United States Military Academy at West Point for “Behind the Army Physical Fitness Test”
Faculty Mentor: David del Cuadro-Zimmerman

Honorable Mention: Christopher Belica, Kendall Collins Riley, and Safia Hattab of Hope College for “The Effects of Positivity and Negativity on Response Length”
Faculty Mentor: Yew-Meng Koh

Intermediate Statistics Competition

1st Place: Mikoto Kobayashi, Abigail Lewis, Mukund Kalani, and Anjali Jha of Grinnell College for “Sharper Whites and Brighter Brights: Cost-Effective Stain Removal for College Students”
Faculty Mentor: Jeff Jonkman

2nd Place: Yujie Wei and Jingyuan Gan of Wellesley College for “Facebook or Fakebook: Identifying Fake Facebook Accounts”
Faculty Mentor: Qing Wang

3rd Place: Lauren Acker, Natalie Cook, and Zack Jones of Grinnell College for “The Rural-Urban Divide and Belief in ‘America First’: A Logistic Regression Analysis”
Faculty Mentor: Jeff Jonkman

3rd Place: Margaret McGuire of the College of Wooster for “Predicting Tooth Loss from North Carolina Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey Data”
Faculty Mentor: Marian Frazier

Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Daly, Charlotte Siewick, Caroline Simmons, and Yimeng Xiao of the University of Virginia for “Forecasting Carbon Dioxide Levels in Mauna Loa, Hawaii: A Study of the Moving Averages Smoothing Method”
Faculty Mentor: Krista Varanyak

Honorable Mention: Simon Couch of Reed College for “A Geo-Spatial Study of Bikeshare Station Locations”
Faculty Mentor: Heather Kitada

For the Undergraduate Statistics Research Project Competition (USRESP), the winners are the following:

1st Place: Jasmine Horan (Amherst College) for “Fixing the Curve: Improving Major League Baseball Pitch Classification with Model-Based Clustering”
Faculty Mentor: Nicholas Horton

1st Place: Simon Couch, Zeki Kazan, and Kaiyan Shi of Reed College for “A Differentially Private Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test”
Faculty Mentor: Andrew Bray

3rd Place: Omar Kamal and Hanao Li of the University of Nevada, Reno for “Predicting Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury Mortalities”
Faculty Mentors: Mihye Ahn and So Young Ryu

Honorable Mention: Ademide Ajayi of Yale University for “Using Natural Language Processing to Observe and Understand Public Opinion of the President of Nigeria”
Faculty Mentor: Xiaofei Wang

Honorable Mention: Katya Kelly and Katie Jolly of Macalester College for “Whip It Like a (Wo)Man: Survival Analysis of Minority Contestants on MasterChef Junior”
Faculty Mentor: Vittorio Addona

The deadline for students to submit their work for the next submission cycle is June 28. Both spring 2019 and year-long projects are eligible, and winners receive cash prizes.