Tan, Jake. (2025). FIRST® Robotics Competition - Winning Chances. SCORE Network/FIRST® Robotics Module.
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Tan, Jake. (2023). Team Contributions to the Alliance in FIRST® Robotics Competitions. The 2023 Joint Statistics Meetings Proceedings.
Tan, Jake, and McDaniels, Christopher. (2022). Time to War in the Thucydides Trap. The 2022 Joint Statistics Meetings Proceedings, pp 1196-1202.
In collaboration with the SCORE Network which is funded by the National Science Foundation, I developed a standalone lesson module which introduced Brier Score. This lesson included a data set based on FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) event data and has students apply their learnings to determine the effectiveness of the Expected Points Added (EPA) model for predicting the outcome of a given FRC match. This lesson was published to SCORE's Module Repository
Originally spurred on by issues my robotics team was facing when making alliance selection decisions, this personal project involved using Akaike Weights to determine the effectiveness of two popular performance metrics used in FRC. Expected Points Added (EPA) and Offensive Power Rating (OPR) are two different approaches to the same goal of approximating how a team contributes to an alliance. Using my findings about the effectiveness of each metric along with its weight when deciding picking order, I was able to help my team improve our selection process, leading to greater success at competition. I also presented my findings at the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM) 2023 as both a poster and an oral presentation, having my paper published in the JSM Proceedings.
In my first data science project, I delved into a case study by Harvard professor Graham Allision, the Thucydides Trap. In collaboration with my history/enrichment teacher to translate historical events into tangible data, I developed a survival analysis of a series of historical conflicts with the goal of predicting the nature of a future one. The process was a thrilling journey that culminated in my first published data science paper and a poster presentation at an international conference.