Truman Team Wins Top Award in DataFest Competition

Statistics and data science students won the top award in the American Statistical Association DataFest, April 5-6.

DataFest is a nationwide competition for undergraduates with the goal of analyzing a big data set provided by a corporate or non-profit sponsor. It provides students with an opportunity to learn valuable skills that can help prepare them for the job market.

Out of the 27 teams from around the state, Truman was represented by three teams comprising 12 students, including the team that won Best in Show. The winning team included: Matthew Wolz, sophomore data science major; Jossua Chartier, junior statistics major; Bek Usmonov, junior statistics major; and Nathan Bresette, senior statistics major. Bresette was also on the team that won the Best in Show prize in 2024.

At the competition, students received a large data set and were given less than 24 hours to create an executive summary report and five-minute presentation that tells a story from the data, complete with statistical analysis and interesting visualizations. Teams were asked to explore real, proprietary data provided from the commercial real estate advising firm Savills, looking for property categories that might be systemically overpriced or underpriced for their particular market. Students were given multiple tables of data, totaling more than six million rows of data across more than 100 total variables. The completed report and presentation were reviewed by a panel of real-world experts who selected winners in several categories.