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This study investigates perceptions and use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools among students and faculty in statistics and data science at a historically Black college or university. Survey data from 119 valid student responses and 14 faculty responses were used to examine familiarity, usage patterns, perceived benefits, awareness of limitations, and instructional support needs. Students reported substantial use of GenAI, with ChatGPT as the dominant tool, primarily for coding assistance and writing support. Although student perceptions of AI in data science workflows and careers were generally positive, confidence in interpreting AI-generated outputs was limited, and concerns about accuracy, reliability, and over-reliance were common. Faculty also viewed GenAI favorably, but self-rated proficiency and the frequency of classroom integration remained limited. Comparisons across student subgroups suggested that familiarity with GenAI and awareness of its limitations varied more by academic level than by gender. These findings highlight a gap between AI adoption and AI literacy and underscore the need for structured training, validation practices, and clearer institutional guidance for responsible AI integration in data science education. 

Predictive modeling often ignores interaction effects among predictors in high-dimensional data because of analytical and computational challenges. Research in interaction selection has been galvanized along with methodological and computational advances. In this study, we aim to investigate the performance of two types of predictive algorithms that can perform interaction selection. Specifically, we compare the predictive performance and interaction selection accuracy of both penalty-based and tree-based predictive algorithms. Penalty-based algorithms included in our comparative study are the regularization path algorithm under the marginality principle (RAMP), the least absolute shrinkage selector operator (LASSO), the smoothed clipped absolute deviance (SCAD), and the minimax concave penalty (MCP). The tree-based algorithms considered are random forest (RF) and iterative random forest (iRF). We evaluate the effectiveness of these algorithms under various regression and classification models with varying structures and dimensions. We assess predictive performance using the mean squared error for regression and accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, balanced accuracy, and F1 score for classification. We use interaction coverage to judge the algorithm’s efficacy for interaction selection. Our findings reveal that the effectiveness of the selected algorithms varies depending on the number of predictors (data dimension) and the structure of the data-generating model, i.e., linear or nonlinear, hierarchical or non-hierarchical. There were at least one or more scenarios that favored each of the algorithms included in this study. However, from the general pattern, we are able to recommend one or more specific algorithm(s) for some specific scenarios. Our analysis helps clarify each algorithm’s strengths and limitations, offering guidance to researchers and data analysts in choosing an appropriate algorithm for their predictive modeling task based on their data structure.