Fall Data Viz Symposium

 

DSCI 310 students win "Best overall” and “Best visualization” in the ASA’s 2022 “Fall Data Challenge”

(* from This is Statistics *)

In this year’s Fall Data Challenge, After the Bell, 72 teams and 262 students submitted their data analyses on how to enhance familial involvement in the K-12 educational experience using data from the National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES)’s 2019 Parents and Family Involvement (PFI) Survey.

“Our annual Fall Data Challenge continues to be an opportunity for students to demonstrate their statistical and data analysis skills and to illustrate the importance of statistics as a future career for those who wish to better the world,” says American Statistical Association (ASA) Executive Director Ron Wasserstein. “This year’s dataset highlights one of many ways in which statistics offers insights that inform and improve our lives.” 

Using this national dataset from across the United States, participants were challenged to provide insights on how to enhance and support family involvement in K -12 education. Students evaluated variables such as homework assistance, family activities, and level of parent engagement in schools.  Teams recommended that schools provide parents and guardians more frequent opportunities to participate in after-school activities, host multiple parent-teacher meetings and open houses throughout the school year, and to increase the frequency of communication between schools and parents and guardians. 

For this year’s contest, teams of two to five students submitted either a video presentation or a slide presentation of their evaluation process, analysis and recommendations. A panel of judges — American Statistical Association members with expertise in Census data, family involvement, and education, as well as National Household Education Surveys statisticians who helped collect this year’s dataset — assessed the submissions to determine the top high school and undergraduate teams for overall analysis, and honorable mentions for best data visualization and use of external data.

Congratulations to the winning teams from WSU!

Best Overall: 

Undergraduate: 

Team: R.B.P. Team
Students: Rachel Knox, Benjamin Moonen and Paige Yang
Sponsor: Silas Bergen
Institution: Winona State University, Winona, MN
View presentation here

Honorable Mention, Best Visualization: 

Undergraduate:

Team: Winona Warriors
Students: Daniel Findell, Abby Smith and Gunner McLeod
Sponsor: Silas Bergen
Institution: Winona State University, Winona, MN
View presentation here

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, November 30, Gild155

What Baseball Statistics Factor Most into Wins Above Replacement (WAR) Sam Wooden
In this talk, I give my take on what baseball statistics are most important in contributing to a player’s WAR (Wins Above Replacement). I took basic and advanced statistics of MLB players over the past 20 years and used R code, Tableau visualizations, and statistical analysis to summarize the impact of these numbers.
Internship Experience at Three Links Care Center Zachary Barron
	This talk will provide an overview of an internship I completed as a data science intern at Three Links Care Center. The various tasks completed with Human Resources and the Accounting departments will be discussed. This presentation will give the audience insight into the field of older adult services and a look at the challenges following the impact of the COVID – 19 pandemic.

Grad School Panel

Graduate Student Panel “The Day and the Life of Being a Graduate Student”

Wednesday, Nov 16 12:00 – 12:45PM in Gild 155

Math Education Panel

Math Teaching Panel

Wednesday, November 9th 12:00- 12:50 PM

SLC 120; Pizza served at 11:30

Mary Morem	Cory Hanson	Connie Sikkink
Superintendent at Houston Public Schools	Principal at Lewiston-Altura High School	Math Teacher at Lewiston-Altura High School
Bachelor WSU Elementary Ed and Coaching Masters in Ed St. Mary's Educational Specialist Walden University Superintendent Licensure St. Mary's 28 years in education Hobbies: Being with grandkids; hiking, boating, swimming, and skiing	5-12 Social Studies - Bachelor's Master of Arts in Literacy Doctorate in Educational Leadership 20 years in education Hobbies: fishing and hunting	Bachelor of Science in Teaching (Math Education) from Winona State University Master’s in Ed (Teaching and Learning) from Saint Mary’s University 16+ years in education Hobbies: Read, watch TV, do things with family and friends

Come ask questions about the teaching field!

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, November 2, Gild155

Predicting NSIC Conference Wins and Rankings for Baseball and Softball Amberly Langer & Noah Johnson

This talk will discuss our capstone project that investigates predicting win percentage for the NSIC Conference. We investigated different regression strategies for modeling win percentage. We also investigated rankings within the conference using the Bradley Terry Model. This presentation will compare the rankings based on the Bradley Terry Model to the actual NSIC standings for the 2021 season.

Departmental Seminar

Creative and Curious Math for Undergraduate People

Dr. Aaron Wangberg
Winona State University

Abstract:  Mathematics is supposed to be fun. And Hard. And Useful. But Fun! In this interactive talk, we’ll find patterns in addition, play a series of pattern guessing games, and explore how Ms. Pacman plays tic-tac-toe. Along the way, we’ll develop a picture of doing mathematics that values creativity and curiosity that helps kids, grandparents, and everyone in between be mathematicians. This talk is accessible to all students.

Wednesday, October 26^th,

12:00- 12:50 PM

Gildemeister 155

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, September 19, Gild155

Automating Survey Management with Qualtrics Emma Rector
This talk will give an overview of the work I did this summer as part of the MASDER (Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education Research) project. The goal of the project is to develop new surveys for assessing attitudes towards statistics and data science education as well as a website for survey distribution and reporting. I will discuss my work with the Qualtrics API in R to improve our data extraction process for reports and how the project will benefit in the next stages.

Departmental Seminar

Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education

Dr. April Kerby
Winona State University

Abstract:  Statistics educators have been studying undergraduate student attitudes toward statistics for decades, but with lack of modern instruments for collecting attitudes and no mechanism for studying these attitudes at the national scale. Through our NSF-funded grant (DUE-2013392), our research team is creating a family of validated instruments to measure student attitudes toward statistics or data science, instructor attitudes toward teaching statistics or data science, and the learning environment. This talk will describe the goals of the grant, the six instruments under development and the development process, and a brief summary of the current psychometric findings.

Wednesday, October 5^th,

12:00- 12:50 PM

Gildemeister 155

Distinguished Lecturer in Mathematics

 

Student Summer Research Talk

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, September 7, Gild155

My Experience in the 2022 Colorado SIBS Program Joe Nagel
This talk will provide an overview of the Colorado Summer Institute in Biostatistics (CoSIBS) program that I participated in during the summer of 2022. The CoSIBS program included classes covering the theory and methods of biostatistics. In this program, I also worked on a research project which applied spectral clustering to metabolomic and proteomic data. This program offered many opportunities to explore Denver and the surrounding areas. The 2022 CoSIBS program culminated with a hackathon.

Math/Stat Club Picnic

 

Student Internship Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, April 20, SLC120

Data Visualization Applied to Financial Consulting Sadie Sedacca
This talk will provide an overview of an internship as a data science intern at Integrated Consulting Services. The tasks and visualizations created for clients will be included as well as a summary of the benefits of working as a consultant for a smaller firm. This presentation will give insight into the invaluable experience of working with business owners trying to navigate the lasting impacts of the COVID–19 pandemic.
Shared Investments: Gold to Platinum Aaron Turnblad
	This presentation will be on a project that I was assigned through my internship with Fastenal. Fastenal’s Share Investment program, a membership Fastenal vendors can join to get exclusive benefits. The main question that marketing wanted to be answered was, does switching from the Gold tier to the Platinum tier increase the amount we spend with the vendor? This was approached using a paired t-test for vendors who stayed in the Shared Investment program who were gold in 2021 and upgraded to platinum in 2022.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, April 13, SLC120

Parity for Non-Integer Numbers Aaron Lewis
This talk summarizes an exploratory analysis of the concept of parity for non-integer numbers. Using a generalization of parity derived from integers' interaction with exponents of negative numbers, a rational extension is derived. Using sets generated by different branches of the complex logarithm, and the resulting geometric structures in the complex plane, a definition for parity over the rationals is determined. An attempt is made at extending the definition further into the reals and complex numbers, and while a definition is found for some complex numbers, issues with irrational numbers prevent a full extension into the real and complex numbers
Analysis Programming Consultant and Forecasting Methods Carly Vandenhouten
	This talk will give an overview of a summer internship as an analysis programming consultant to the pharmaceutical research industry. The tasks and deliverables required of the analysis programming team involved in a large-scale clinical trial will be discussed. Another part of this presentation will involve a separate consulting position with the Winona YMCA looking at past membership trends and basic forecasting methods to predict the future membership of the Winona location.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:45 PM, Wednesday, March 23, SLC120

Comparing Geospatial Interpolation Methods for Modeling Snow Depths David Larson
This project focuses on geospatial interpolation, which is the predicting of unknown values at geographical locations using locations with known values. This project examined various geospatial interpolation methods and comparing them by evaluating how well they were able to predict snow depth. These methods include nearest neighbor, inverse distance weighting, and kriging.
Fantasy Football Projections with Data Analytics Caleb VanDerBeek
	In this talk, I will be discussing the accuracy of fantasy football projections, how they are made, and how to make them yourself. I will also discuss why it is so hard to create accurate predictions, especially without data. The intent of the project was to learn new ways to clean, summarize, and visualize data in relation to fantasy football.

Departmental Seminar

March Madness! Picking Your NCAA Bracket with Linear Algebra

Dr. Aaron Wangberg
Winona State University

Abstract:  How do you pick your NCAA Bracket? Do you value home wins, early season games, and blowouts against Division II and III foes? Or is it better to base everything on the last five games of the season? Bring your computer to fill out your NCAA Bracket and hear the math that has helped WSU Linear Algebra students finish in the top 90% of ESPN's Bracket Challenge.

Wednesday, March 16^th,

12:00- 12:50 PM

Science Laboratory Center/SLC 120

Happy Pi Day!

 

Dr. Leonhardi and Dr. Bergen were pie-ed by the Math/Stat Club.

Math/Stat Club Pi Day Celebration

 

Distinguished Lecturer Series

 

We are pleased to announce that our Distinguished Lecturer in Mathematics and Statistics for the 2021-22 academic year, Dr. Lauren Klein of Emory University, will be presenting on Zoom two distinguished lectures: “Data Feminism in Action” on Wednesday, March 2, from 3-4 p.m. and “Data Feminism” on Thursday, March 3, from 12:45-1:45 p.m.

Dr. Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a focus on issues of gender and race. She is the author of “An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States” (2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, “Data Feminism” (2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits “Debates in the Digital Humanities,” a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.

 

Talk #1: Data Feminism in Action (Virtual)

Date: Wednesday, March 2

Time: 3:00 - 4:00 pm

In-Person Viewing Location: SLC 120

Zoom Link: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/91571903912

Abstract: What is feminist data science? How is feminist thinking being incorporated into data-driven work? How are scholars in the humanities and social sciences bringing together data science and feminist theory in their research? Drawing from her recent book, “Data Feminism,“ coauthored with Catherine D’Ignazio, Klein will present a set of principles for doing data science that are informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. To illustrate these principles, as well as some of the ways that scholars and designers have begun to put them into action, she will discuss a range of recent research projects including several of her own: 1) a thematic analysis of a large corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers that reveals the invisible labor of women newspaper editors; 2) the development of a model of lexical semantic change that, when combined with network analysis, tells a new story about Black activism in the nineteenth-century United States; and 3) an interactive book on the history of data visualization that shows how questions of politics have been present in the field since its start. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical, more intentional, and more capacious data practices. 

 

Talk #2: Data Feminism (Virtual)

Date: Thursday, March 3

Time: 12:45 – 1:45 pm

In-Person Viewing Location: Kryzsko Ballroom (registration required)

Zoom Link: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/96504864291

Abstract: As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices.

Math/Stat Club Game Night

 

Math/Stat Club Trivia Night

 

Departmental Seminar

Applying unsupervised and supervised learning methods to minimize risk to bald eagles from industrial wind turbines

Dr. Silas Bergen
Winona State University

Abstract:  In this talk, I describe a collaboration with research wildlife biologists and statisticians to analyze over 2 million data points collected from GPS telemetry devices attached to bald eagles. My research project involved two phases.  In the first phase, I applied unsupervised learning methods to identify distinct bald eagle behavioral flight modes using the flight data obtained from the GPS observations.  In the second phase, I applied supervised learning methods to classify behavior risks using environmental data to understand how bald eagle flight related to underlying land features and topography.   The intent of this project was to understand land types where bald eagles might be at greater risk of collision with industrial wind turbines to inform placement of wind farms.  This majority of the talk will be accessible to the general public; the entirety will be accessible to 2^nd- or 3^rd-year statistics/data science majors.

Wednesday, January 19^th,

12:00- 12:50 PM

Science Laboratory Center/SLC 120