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Keynote Address: How to be the best statistician or data scientist: It’s not what you think

The world of statistics – including data science – is rapidly evolving.  New technologies that enable methods and novel approaches have rapidly emerged in the new millennium.   As aspiring statisticians and data scientists, students recognize the importance of learning mathematics and theory associated with these careers, as well as the applications of statistical analysis and data analytics.  That seems necessary… but is it sufficient?

Computational Analysis of the Transformation of Former Colonial Countries

This paper does a computational analysis to understand the extent to which former colonies have been transformed due to colonial rule. This extent is represented by the response variable: Colonial Transformation Score, from a scale of 0 to 100. This paper uses multivariate ridge regression analysis to identify the significant variables impacting the transformation and to what degree these variables are influencing. This paper also considers how the duration of colonialism impacts the level of transformation – with the KMeans Clustering algorithm.

Blue Blood Basketball

Historically, college basketball has been dominated by a select group of universities. The most elite are often referred to as Blue Blood schools. They are as follows: Duke University, the University of Kentucky, Kansas University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of California - Los Angeles. Many players from these universities have gone on to be stars at the professional level.

Novel Method of Culturing Bacteria Using Soil Extract and Nutrient-Rich Broths

The misuse of antibiotics and the lack of development for novel antimicrobial compounds have culminated in an antibiotic resistance crisis that threatens the life of humans. Various strategies have been proposed to overcome this crisis, one of which is to find compounds in unknown bacteria through different techniques of bacterial culturing. With the same goals in mind, we investigated our method of combining soil extract with nutrient-rich broths to create compound agars.

A Retrospective Look at Covid-19 Testing Performance

In this research paper, we analyze how the sensitivity (the likelihood that those with the disease test positive), specificity (the likelihood that those without the disease test negative), and disease prevalence affect the Covid-19 testing performance. We use a set of different sensitivity and specificity values with a range of prevalence values to evaluate test performance in terms of positive predictive value (PPV, the likelihood that those who test positive have the disease) and negative predictive value (NPV, the likelihood that those who test negative do not have the disease).

Statistical Analysis of Factors Impacting Hotel Review Scores in the Las Vegas Strip

Due to the well known nature of Las Vegas as a large hub for gambling and travel, a study was conducted to look at the factors which would best help to predict TripAdvisor ratings for hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. A high hotel rating would likely translate to higher foot traffic in the corresponding hotel and thus a higher income. The data used described stays in the hotels in the year 2015.