WOMBAT 2025

The Annual Workshop Organised by the Monash Business Analytics Team.
29th-30th September 2025
Monash University (downtown), 750 Collins St, Melbourne

The annual WOMBAT workshop brings together analysts from academia, industry and government to learn and discuss new open source tools for business analytics and data science. The theme of this year’s event is designing data driven discoveries, which will feature tutorials and talks on statistical software, research collaboration, and impactful data analysis. You should come if you are an analytics professional, or leading a team of analysts or a developer of new open source tools.

Registration

Registration for WOMBAT is open now, with early bird pricing until August 31st. Registration for the tutorials on day 1 and the workshop on day 2 is done separately. Attendance will be limited to 20 participants (in-person and online) for each of the 8 tutorials on day 1, and 100 participants (in-person only) for day 2’s workshop. We will also have a rich collection of hex stickers available for all to choose from to decorate your laptop!

Tutorials (September 29th)

The WOMBAT tutorials offerings feature practical, hands-on training in key topics for data analysis by experts in the field. Each tutorial consists of three hours of content with a 30-minute catered tea break, offered in both morning (AM) and afternoon (PM) sessions, and each tutorial is limited to 20 in-person participants. In the morning, you can choose from sessions on R package development, regression analysis, time series forecasting, or visualising uncertainty; in the afternoon, there are options covering reproducible reporting with Quarto, scientific figure design, accelerating R modelling with C++, or efficiency analysis using Python.

Workshop (September 30th)

The main day of WOMBAT features a diverse workshop program designed to highlight the latest data analysis tools and techniques. The workshop features a keynote presentation by data visualisation specialist Nicola Rennie, followed by invited talks from leading data analysts from academia, government, and industry. Key topics featured throughout the conference include data storytelling, effective data visualisation, workflow and team management, open-source tools, and reproducibility in data analysis. More details about the workshop are detailed below.

Keynote

Nicola Rennie

Nicola Rennie is a data visualisation specialist, working at the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom. She has a background in statistics and data science, who is interested in understanding how to effectively communicate quantitative information in an accessible way. She advocates for using open source tools, and has experience in D3, Svelte, R, and Python. Nicola co-authored the Royal Statistical Society’s Best Practices for Data Visualisation guidance and is a member of the Editorial Board of Significance magazine, particularly focused on data visualisation. Nicola is a committee member and secretary of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Teaching Statistics Section Group, and is also one of the RSS’s 2024-2025 William Guy Lecturers who has recorded and delivered talks aimed at 11-16 year olds on the topic of using data and statistics to shape decision making in medicine and healthcare. She has also previously been a committee member of the R-Ladies Global Team and the R-Ladies Lancaster chapter organiser.

Designing for decision-making: How to build effective data visualisations

Data visualisation can be a very efficient method of identifying patterns in data and communicating findings to broad audiences. Good data visualisation requires appreciation and careful consideration of the technical aspects of data presentation. But it also involves a creative element. Authorial choices are made about the “story” we want to tell, and design decisions are driven by the need to convey that story most effectively to our audience. Software systems use default settings for most graphical elements. However, each visualisation has its own story to tell, and so we must actively consider and choose settings for the visualisation we are building. In this talk, Nicola will showcase why you should visualise data, present some guidelines for making more effective charts, before discussing examples of good and not so good charts.

Sessions

Invited Talks: Data Storytelling & Communication

This session highlights practical tools and skills for presenting data in compelling, audience-friendly ways. It features a presentation by James Goldie on making “scrollytelling” articles with Quarto and Closeread, this presentation format is highly engaging for data stories as visualisations can animate to match the story as readers scroll through the article.

In Conversation: Rob Hyndman & Nick Tierney on Research Software

Join Professor Rob Hyndman and Dr. Nick Tierney, hosted by Cynthia Huang, as they discuss what research software engineering, open-source development, and reproducibility mean in practice. The conversation will demystify how statistical software and R packages are created and maintained, and why open-source tools matter for advancing and sharing data analysis.

Showcase: Recent Software from NUMBATs

See the latest data analysis tools developed by staff and students at Monash University’s Non-Uniform Monash Business Analytics Team (NUMBATs). This session features new R packages designed to help you discover patterns in your data.

Invited Talks: Designing Workflows & Team

This session provides practical insights into effective team and workflow management in data projects. Saras Windecker will share lessons from implementing peer code review in a multi-institutional research consortium focused on epidemic forecasting and analytics. Tyler Reysenbach will discuss real-world strategies for building new data teams in government, including balancing early stakeholder demands with long-term capability building.