Heads up Duke undergrads and graduate students — here’s an opportunity to hang out in the beautifully renovated Gross Hall, get creative with your friends using big data and compete for cash prizes and statistics fame.
Datafest, a data analysis competition that started at UCLA, is in its third year in the Triangle. Every year, a mystery client provides a dataset that teams can analyze, tinker with and visualize however they’d like over the course of a weekend. Think hackathon, but for data junkies.
“The datasets are bigger and more complex than what you’ll see in a classroom, but they’re of general interest,” said organizer Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, an assistant professor of the practice in the Duke statistics department. “We want to encourage students from all levels.”
Last year’s mystery client was online dating website eHarmony (you can read about it here), and teams investigated everything from heightism to Myers-Briggs personality matches in online dating. In 2012, the dataset came from Kiva, the microlending site.
This year’s dataset provider will be revealed on the first day of Datafest. Sign up ends this Friday, March 7, Monday, March 10, so assemble your team and register here!