Meetings/Events

September 2018 Meetings

9/26/2018

September 5th, 2018: The first official meeting of the year was held in STAT 006 from 4-5pm. We gave introductions and having Brooke Anderson speak to us-- Brooke works on projects with Environmental and Public Health applications and has a lot of experience building and publishing R packages, running hackathons, and trying to make code accessible.

September 8th, 2018: The Statistics Department's annual fall picnic potluck at Spring Canyon Community Park to meet faculty, staff, and graduate students within the Stat Department! Make sure to sign up and bring a dish to share! Email us for more details!

September 19th, 2018: We bought and made cookies and used data we collected while tabling on the Plaza to predict which cookies people would believe would be the best. Afterwards, we compared the predictions with the results.

4/5 Meeting Minutes - Class recommendations

4/5/2018

Hi all,

We spent today's meeting focusing on a panel with faculty and Stat major seniors so freshman, sophomores, and juniors can learn about the different classes and what to expect.

List of "electives" from the adviser:

Stat 305
Stat 400
Stat 421 (no one in the room had completed 421, one person had dropped it)
Stat 440
Stat 460
Math 317
Math 340
Math 345
Math 348
Math 331
Math 301
Math 360

Seniors recommendations:

Stat 400 - "it allows you to take on the title 'data scientist'"
CS 220 - Discrete Math - "if you want to learn more about probability", "if you're going in the data science direction, you need to take CS 165 in addition to this"
Get linear algebra out of the way as quickly as possible - it's very applicable in classes even when not necessary.
If you're worried about taking a class, and it has multiple sections, try attending multiple sections to see how different professors/grads are teaching it.
If you're interested in graduate programs you should take Math 317, because it requires you to prove truths are true and those are great skills to have in graduate programs. Some seniors recommend taking it in the summer or take its prereq Math 235.
If you take Stat 420/430, give yourself a lot of fun electives because 420/430 are very work-load heavy and requires a lot of mathematics/calculus. Some professors are more inclined to explain what they're doing in their calculus (Mary Meyer for example) but they're the hardest classes in the Stats program.
Stat 440 without Stat 420 makes it difficult to feel comfortable to create Bayesian models, but at least having the experience of taking an introductory Bayesian class can give you an advantage on your resume.
If you like Math 369 (Linear Algebra I) don't take Math 469 (Linear Algebra II)

Some notes about the new Data Science (DSCI) major:

Takes a combination of Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, and Economics classes and subjects. There are new DSCI courses being offered, and they may allow non-DSCI majors to take it, at least while it's still new. If you were to major in DSCI, it would be very easy to minor in its composition subjects (Math, Stats, CS, Econ). However, the first Data Science degrees will not be conferred until 2021. There will be no 400 level courses until the 2019-2020 academic year.
DSCI will have a new Linear Algebra that is optimized for Data Science (DSCI 369).

A lot of seniors also recommend taking some writing classes (and the solo Communications major recommends some speech classes) to be a better writer, because that's a struggle a lot of students in teh Statistics department have:

CO300 - You are supposed to take JTC300, but usually the Stats department will allow you to substitute in CO300 because it is an advanced argumentation writing class. If you don't want to learn how to write an email, a resume, a linkedin profile, research project, etc. and would prefer to learn how to write a paper, take this. You can take both and they're very different classes but you aren't required to take both.
SPCM200 - Public Speaking (a very necessary skill)
SPCM207 - Public Argumentation (has a few public speaking aspects to it, but focus a lot on writing an argument and being able to deliver it effectively)

11/3/17- 2017 Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference Viewing Party

10/31/2017

Come join us Friday, November 3 for a viewing party of the 2017 Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference. We will be in classroom 1205 in the new stadium from 10-3! Lunch and snacks will be provided! Come for the whole event or stop by when you can!

10/24 Meeting Minutes

10/24/2017

Communications in Statistics Presentation, presented by Kyra Ferguson: https://www.swipe.to/1460fc

Meeting Minutes: 10/10

10/10/2017

Hello everyone!

Here are the minutes from tonight's meeting. Our next meeting is October 24th in Stat 006 at 5pm.

Announcements

Co-Wy Chapter Meeting is October 27th in Aurora, 8am-5:30pm. It is a Friday, so if you would like to go, we can help you organize carpool and getting an excuse note for classes.
Jennifer Hoeting Presentation on Graduate School on Friday, October 13th 3:00-3:5pm in Weber 237.
- Will be talking about how to apply, getting paid to attend grad school, biostatistics versus statistics, pathways to get into grad school, pathways within grad school, etc.
ASA price for membership is $5 if you are on our official roster. If you want to purchase an ASA membership, contact Jack (hillj@rams.colostate.edu) and he can get you on the official roster
Next meeting October 24th will have a presentation by Caroline from her work at the CU Med program. She worked in SPSS.
Please RSVP for the October 24th meeting at 5pm in Stat 006 on the homepage of the website so we can get an accurate count for food.

Meeting Minutes 9/26

9/26/2017

Hello everyone! Here are the minutes for today's meeting. If you go over to the projects tab, you will find a set of datasets that we worked with today as part of playing with and understanding R as an application.

Announcements

ASA membership cost is going up in a few days. If you are interested in being a member, do so now before the prices go us
SOARS next Monday at 4pm in 223H Weber
- Ben Prytherch and Mary Meyers will be there talking about P-values and how we interpret them
Caroline is our new Social Media Officer!
Zhao Ren from University of Pittsburgh
- Monday October 9th 4pm-5pm in Webser 237
Next meeting: October 10th 5pm-6pm in Stat 006
- RSVP on the homepage of the website so we can make sure we have enough food!

Working with R data

Provide a bunch of datasets to work with
- Degrees-that-pay
- Salaries-by-colleges
- Salaries-by-region
- Imdb_movie
- Usnames
- nhl_team_stats_2016-17
You can find all of these datasets in the project tab of the website

Meeting Minutes 9/12

9/12/2017

Hello everyone! We hope your 4th week back is going well. Below are our meeting minutes from today's meeting. Our next meeting is Tuesday, September 26th at 5pm in Statistics 006.

Announcements:

Reminder about Rockies’ baseball team speaker
- In the works, information coming soon!
Stats Student Success Center is open! 8am - 8pm. Grads and undergrads are available as tutors
Statistics Department Seminars
- Upcoming: Megan Hicks from Neptune, and environmental consulting company, Monday September 25th 4-5pm in Weber 237
Vote on a new Social Media Officer
- If you are interested in being the Social Media Officer, let Jack know.
- Position entails contributing to our social media pages (twitter, instagram, facebook) and website, and uploading the fliers to those pages
ASA Swag
- Those present put down their name and t-shirt size, will come in around October/November

Presentation

Data.gov -- almost 200,000 datasets you can choose based on topics, including but not limited to agriculture, local government, etc.
- Next meeting we will pull data from it and look at data sets and practice statistics
Fivethirtyeight.com is a website similar to Gallup polls
- currently tracking hurricane Irma, predicting Irma’s shifting path with confidence intervals and uncertainty cones.
- You can go on there to look at real life implementation of statistics.
Jack’s internship at Fidelity Investments
- Batch Process Analytics
  - Dollar volume recently passed the $6 trillion
  - Always trying to shorten the time of processing queries
  - Acts like a baton race
  - Worked with machine learning
  - Used multiple packages in R, including modifying the base code in one
  - Report when jobs were going long
- Performance Analytics
  - Analyzing performance complaints
  - Automated warnings for long running queries
  - Created a graph to view when data was released late
    - Noted when the script was changed
    - Killing queries is not more likely on days of late delivery
      - Used a t-test
      - Wasn’t statistically greater
    - Most queries were getting killed within the afternoon around 3pm hours after the delivery of data
      Broken down by kill type (aborted, cancelled, failed rewrite, failed execution)
  - Used Bayesian statistics

Meeting Minutes: 8/25

8/28/2017

Meeting Minutes: 4/11

4/11/2017

Hello everyone! Our next and last meeting of the semester will be April 25th. Make sure to come because we will be having a pot luck at the time!

Announcements:

Mary Meyer came by to tell us about the First Annual CNS Probability Casino, expected to be held at Laurel Village in Mid-February next year. If you are interested in joining, undergraduates on the Organizational Committee will need to register for a one-credit independent study class for the Fall semester. At the very least, undergraduates will need to have taken Stat 315, and preferably at least Stat 420. The class will be Stat 495 Section 2, and you would be required to speak to Kristen to get an override. For more information, email Mary Meyer, or either of the graduate advisors or officers, and we will get you more information.
CO/WY chapter meeting is next week at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), and you can get an approved absence for it. Speak to Josh, Miranda, or Jackson and they will help get you the information you need for that. We will be carpooling there and back, and it is a whole day event.
Our Bee project with the ecology department is going along buzzingly. We will have another session meeting at the Wild Boar on Friday from 4pm to 6pm.

Josh gave us a super cool presentation on a quick intro to Bayesian Statistics by example! If you are interested in learning more about Bayesian, register for Stat 440.

Meeting Notes: 3/28

3/28/2017

Hello everyone! We are beginning to start on projects just in time to wrap up the semester. Jack and Josh brought in some of the information from a meeting about Pollination data. We are also beginning to plan for an end of the year pot luck on April 25th, which is our last meeting of the year.

Our next meeting will be April 11th

Announcements:

CO/WY is coming up, RSVP with Miranda (see below)
Our potluck will be April 25th, our last meeting.
Next meeting, April 11th, Josh will be presenting on Bayesian Statistics.

Projects

DataDriven currently has a dataset for water pumps in Africa called "Pump It Up: Data Mining the Water Table". We will look at that. Jack showed some of the work he has done on it so far. For example, comparing types of pumps (ie, rope, gravity pump), types of water. Things to consider are location type for types of water, if they had permits or not.
Ecology Bee Pollination Project: This is a messy Citizen Science data set that we are looking into starting with the Ecology department. We would have to clean data, and help come up with guidelines for other projects going forward. One convenience sample data set to use for guideline/example is iNaturalist.org (its data is downloadable). Because it is a citizen scientist project, the issue with the data is figuring out if the data represents a large insect population being reported, or just a lot of participation. Another issue is the accuracy of the data, because not all of it can be confirmed, but some users have higher level reporting skills linked to their accounts. While this is potentially a very big and intimidating project, we have many professors and grad students willing to help us work through it. Josh, Kyra, and Jack all met with the people in the Ecology department to get specifics. One of the things would be to help figure out where are observations are more likely to occur and how to set a protocol for research going forward with this kind of data.
- Possible solutions to look into: blocking, Presence/Absence models, controlling for areas/types of people

Upcoming Events:

CO/WY Chapter of the American Statistical Association Regional Meeting on Friday April 21, 2017. You can get an excused absence for this and we will provide Transportation. RSVP with Miranda.Fix@colostate.edu

<<Previous

Meetings & Events