Although the current use of statistics in baseball is extensive, a similar approach in softball is much less developed. In this paper, selected softball statistics (representing various offensive, defensive, and pitching measures) from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC, NCAA Division III) are analyzed to determine the relationship between these statistics and team success over the course of a season.

Estimation of ex-ante or future realized volatility is crucial to the financial industry. In this paper we explore the use of a Bayesian method to estimate the implied volatility on stock options which in turn will allow us to estimate the future realized volatility on the underlying. We find that this method is more accurate in estimating the implied volatility than estimates using historical volatility.

The last decade has seen a rapid rise in the number of bikeshare programs, where bikes are made available throughout a community on an as-needed basis. Given that many of these programs are at least partially publicly funded, a central concern of operators and investors is whether these systems operate equitably.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump rallied tremendous support from rural voters and frequently spouted the phrase "America first." After the 2016 election, the Grinnell College National Poll surveyed 1,002 individuals collecting data on their behavior and opinions related to topical political issues, including their identity as a "believer in America first." We hypothesized that higher proportions of participants from rural areas would self-identify as believers in America first than those from urban areas.

Fans watching a basketball game often believe that they can sense when one team has "momentum". Coaches seem to take timeouts when their team is on a negative scoring run, feeling pressure to stop an opponent’s quick flurry of scoring. This paper examines how timeouts are used in NCAA Division 1 men's basketball and whether there is any truth to the notion that timeouts stop opponent momentum by decreasing the rate of opponent scoring or swinging the rate of scoring in favor of the timeout-calling team.

Representation is a topic of great importance as the United States becomes increasingly diverse, particularly because of the impact on young children. In this paper, children’s books from Drake Library in Grinnell, Iowa were analyzed to determine if one sex or race was overrepresented.

Millions of college basketball fans across America participate in the March Madness Bracket Challenge each year. People utilize different strategies, ranging from simple tactics to complex computational strategies. Due to the overwhelming number of possible outcomes, no one has been able to create a perfect bracket. My research studies how people choose which teams will advance in the tournament. To do this I collected a variety of data including traditional ranking information, advanced team performance data, and previous NCAA Tournament success.

Understanding and recognizing trends in scatter plots is a keep step in many statistical analyses, but these trends are not always obviously apparent. Unclear trends can be particularly problematic during exploratory data analysis. In this paper I present a way to use convolutional neural networks to detect trends in scatter plots, taking some inspiration from previous work done in quantifying scatter plots using scatter plot diagnostics or scagnostics.

This presentation looks at how one NCAA Women's Basketball team played in the 2018-2019 season. Every shot location was recorded in a zone on the court. This analysis examines where on the floor the team shot from and how well they shot within each zone. Ultimately, it reveals where under-utilized zones are, providing an opportunity for a more successful team.

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Forest Service monitors and analyzes the nation’s forests to understand their current state and make predictions about future changes. To this end, the FIA collects data from ground plots arranged across the country using a quasi-systematic sampling design. While systematic sampling designs can be more efficient, estimating variance using this design proves challenging relative to estimating variance under simple random sampling.