The 2018 Data Expo was a national data competition held at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Vancouver, Canada. It is currently held every year, but prior to 2019 it was held approximately every three years. Participants were provided three years of weather forecast data for 113 cities across the United States that was harvested from the National Weather Service and three years of historical weather for the same sites. Teams cleaned the data, developed their own study questions, and dove into the data for approximately six months. The results were presented during a speed poster session at JSM. My team consisted of myself, Brennan Bean, and our mentor, Jürgen Symanzik. We took second place.
Our study questions
- Do U.S. weather stations cluster into regions based on weather characteristics?
- How to error variables correlate and do these correlations change by region?
- Do forecast errors change by region and by season?
- Where are the best and worst forecast accurcies?
- Which variables are important in determining forecast errors?
We found that the U.S. clearly clusters into weather regions, even when the spatial relationship between cities is not used as a covariate. This clustering led us to find strong seasonal effects in forecast accuracy in several regions and find a set of variables within each region that had the largest impact on forecasts. We developed a Shiny App to aid in cluster exploration. The links to our Shiny app and proceedings paper are below. A paper has been submitted to the Journal of Computational Statistics.