Duke Student Team Wins Annual DataFest
Four students from Duke
University spent a weekend recently analyzing
the behavior and preferences of automobile buyers. The result of their
48-hour
data analytics marathon was an award from the American
Statistics Association's
DataFest
for Best Visualization of Data.
The Duke University team was one of more than 25 from
colleges
and universities that participated in the annual competitive
data analytics
event held each year since 2011. More than 100 college students gathered
at
seven campuses around the country to pore over data provided by car
shopping
website Edmunds.com.
They were asked to select data that was available,
analyze it
and then present it to a panel of judges in a presentation with a time
limit,
using only two PowerPoint slides. All the teams were assisted by roving
consultants who were graduate students, faculty members and industry
professionals.
The four Duke University team members — David Clancy,
Tori
Hall, Michael Lin and Gregory Poore, all scheduled to graduate in 2016 —
participated as the Bayes' Anatomy team, focusing on analyzing and
visualizing
auto consumer preferences and behaviors.
"The students found a lot of unexpected and
interesting stories
to tell using the car shopping data from Edmunds," said Duke University
Assistant
Professor Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, one of the founders of the competition. "This
made them appreciate the importance of data analysis skills and made
them
excited for working with such data in the future."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.