Abelard Students' Big Data Challenge Abstracts Published!

Two teams of Abelard students have been selected for scholarly publication by Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press) in this year's Big Data Challenge.

Team One, composed of Emma Adamson-De Luca, Silsopang Paknara, and Tasneem Badshah, used big data and statistical modeling tools such as R cmdr to trace teen pregnancy to a seemingly unlikely cause: unemployment. Big data, when coupled with powerful analysis tools, is of immense worth in converting raw data into powerful insights. This is why the Open Data Initiative by the City of Toronto is so important.

Team Two, composed of Maxim Vorobyov and Adam Kline, focused on big data in the socioeconomic and ecological enviroment to look into two of the most important characteristics of our city– people and the environment, and study how they are connected to each other. To do so, they set up two independent sets of variables and then created two rankings for each neighborhood based on human and environmental dimensions  in order  to compare the relation between the two. They concluded that the main factors affecting these indexes are the percentage of workforce unemployed, the percentage of recent immigrants relative to total population and the percentage of population in the labor force. These are the main areas the city of Toronto should focus on and ameliorate to improve the quality of life of of Torontonians.

To read more, please visit http://journal.stemfellowship.org/doi/abs/10.17975/sfj-2015-013