The Case Studies in Data Analysis Poster Competition will be held during the annual meeting of Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) at Carleton University. The case studies are intended to provide enthusiastic teams of graduate and senior undergraduate students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge to the analysis of big datasets. Each participating team will choose to analyze one of the two datasets described below. Each team is strongly encouraged to identify a faculty member to support the members as they develop their analytic approach and final presentation. Team members will work together to present a poster summarizing their methods and analysis results at the annual meeting.

Case Study 1: Predicting hourly electricity demand in Ontario

Teams that select this case study will use the aggregated provincial-level hourly demand data for all sectors and annual demand data for each sector from the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) and the hourly air temperature and weather data from ETH Zurich and Imperial College London to develop statistical models to predict hourly electricity demand in the residential sector in Ontario.  

Case Study 2: Predicting podcast popularity in iTunes

Teams that select this case study will use podcasts from iTunes to develop statistical models to extract features from the provided podcasts and predict the number of reviews for the podcasts based on the extracted features.

Awards

One award will be presented for the best poster in each of the two case studies. The value of the award from SSC for each case study in the 2020 competition is \$750 with the expectation that this award is shared equally among the members of each winning team. An additional award with value of \$750 will be awarded by CER to the second best team working on Case Study 1. The committee reserves the right to decline giving an award for each case study if the number of entries is insufficient.

SSC also provides a total of $3,000 travel award for all participating teams excluding the winning teams. It is expected that this award will be shared equally among the participating teams excluding the winning teams for both case studies.

Depending on the number of participating teams in each of the two case studies, 1–2 teams for each of the case studies will be selected as honourable mention. There is no cash prize for honourable mentions.

All participating students will receive a certificate of participation.

Important Dates

TBA:   Conference registration       

Teams interested in participating in the competition MUST register for the annual SSC meeting. We require each team to have at least one team member to register for the meeting (using student registration rate). Please check the deadline for the conference registration at https://ssc.ca/en/meetings/annual/2020-annual-meeting

May 11, 2020:  Competition registration

Teams interested in participating in the competition must register by this date by emailing the chair of the case studies in data analysis committee, Dr. Pingzhao Hu (Pingzhao.hu@umanitoba.ca). The registration information should include names and emails of team leader, team members, and faculty mentor(s); university name, case study number, presentation title, and indication of the team member(s) who are registered for the SSC conference.
 

May 18, 2020: Case Study 2 prediction result submission

Teams interested in participating in Case Study 2 must submit their prediction result (an Excel file with two columns: podcast ID, the number of predicted reviews. Please do not round the results into integer numbers.) for each of the podcast in the unlabeled dataset by this date to Dr. Kathryn Morrison (kathryn@precision-analytics.ca). Please name the file as CaseStudyNumber_TeamLeaderFullName_UniversityName.xlsx.  This prediction result will take 30% of your final poster judging score.

May 18, 2020: Abstract and group photo submission

Teams interested in participating in the competition must submit an abstract (maximum 500 words) with sections of introduction, objective, methods, results and conclusions by this date to the chair of the case studies in data analysis committee, Dr. Pingzhao Hu (Pingzhao.hu@umanitoba.ca). The abstract template can be downloaded here. A group photo for each team should be also submitted by this date. Please name the files as CaseStudyNumber_TeamLeaderFullName_UniversityName.

Team size

We require that the number of team members (either undergraduate students or graduate students) in each team to be no more than four.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to members of the case studies in data analysis committee for 2020 for their contributions: Dr.  Kathryn Morrison, Precision Analytics Inc. and McGill University; Chel Hee Lee, Critical Care Medicine, Alberta Health Services & University of Calgary; Dr. Ehsan Karim, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia; Dr. José Ribas Fernandes, Dr. Ryan Hum, Mr. Mantaj Hundal, Mr. Lukas Hansen, Mr. Michael Nadew, Mr. Matthew Hansen, Canada Energy Regulator.

More details can be found at: https://ssc.ca/en/meetings/annual/2020-annual-meeting/case-studies

 

Dr. Pingzhao Hu