County College of Morris students win first place in national DataFest competition
Gaining Best of Show and Best Use of Statistical Analysis
RANDOLPH TOWNSHIP, NJ (Morris County) – County College of Morris (CCM) students, known as the CCM Data Titans, recently brought home two impressive awards from the Spring 2024 American Statistical Association (ASA) national DataFest competition.
They earned first place in the Two-Year College Category and were awarded for Best Statistical Analysis. Founded in 2011, this annual event requires undergraduates to work 24/7 to find and share the meaning of data in what is becoming a popular field of discovery.
CCM congratulates team members, Hamza Alvi, of Rockaway, Favio Jasso, of Dover, David Maldonado, of Wharton, Rohan Sharma, of Mt. Olive, and Lucas Spitzer, of Succasunna, for an amazing job. The students are pursuing their Associate of Science degree in Mathematics, Computer Science-Data Science option and are enrolled in the Certificate of Achievement in Data Analytics program at CCM.
Professor Kelly Fitzpatrick, CFA, of the college’s Department of Mathematics and a Tableau Desktop Specialist, served as the faculty advisor to the team. Fitzpatrick takes the students from zero to 100 in just 15 weeks to learn data science in MAT 114, Introduction to Data Science class.
“It is impressive every semester to see how quickly students can grasp high level data science techniques using technology and be able to perform at a high level to win national competitions,” said Fitzpatrick.
Each year, the ASA DataFest challenges students to analyze real-world data and make recommendations to address interesting and timely topics. The 2024 challenge was to investigate the CourseKata student data and look for discoveries to help improve student success in statistics and data science courses.
Team CCM Data Titans won Best Statistical Analysis by using box plots to detect and remove outliers and extraneous input, regression analysis, decision trees and a heat map to figure out how to improve student success. The team worked aggressively in R, Python and Tableau to perform tidy data techniques, create custom categorical fields and visualizations during the weekend in April.
They presented their results in a five-minute video to the judges. Each team member will receive a $25 gift card to the college’s campus store on behalf of the Campus Life Center and also receive a complimentary ASA student membership.
