STATS207: Final Project

Your class project is an opportunity for you to explore an interesting time series problem in the context of a real-world data set. We are providing some seed project ideas here. You can pick one of these ideas, and explore the data and methods within and beyond what we suggest. You can also use your own data/ideas, but, in this case, you have to make sure you have the data available now and a nice roadmap, since a quarter is too short to explore a brand new concept.

Projects can be done by you as an individual, or in teams of two students. You can discuss your ideas and approach with the instructors, but of course the final responsibility to define and execute an interesting piece of work is yours.

The final project is worth 35% of your grade, which will be split amongst three deliverables:

-   A project milestone (20% of the grade)

-   A project presentation (20% of the grade)

-   A final report (60% of the grade)

Your project will be evaluated by three criteria:

-   Technical Depth: How technically challenging was what you did?

-   Scope: How broad was your project? How many aspects, angles, variations did you explore? 

-   Presentation: How well did you explain what you did, your results, and interpret the outcomes? Did you use the good graphs and visualizations? How clear was the writing?

The Technical Depth and Scope are complementary criteria, e.g., if you develop a single elaborate algorithm or model on a small dataset, you may score high on depth but low on scope, while if you try many very simple methods on different datasets, your scope would be higher but the depth lower.

Project Proposal You must turn in a project proposal on Weds, October 27 by 9:30amRead the list of available data sets and potential project ideas linked above. If you prefer to use a different data set, we will consider your proposal, but you must have access to this data already, and present a clear proposal for what you would do with it.

Project proposal format: Proposals should be one page maximum. Include the following information:

-   Project title

-   Data set

-   Project idea. This should be approximately two paragraphs.

-   Software you will need to write or packages you plan to use.

-   Papers to read. Include 1-3 relevant papers. If you are doing something different than one of the suggested projects, you will probably want to read at least one of them before submitting your proposal.

-   Teammate: will you have a teammate? If so, whom? Maximum team size is two students. One proposal per team.

-   Milestone: What will you complete by the milestone? Experimental results of some kind are expected here.

Project Milestone

A project milestone should be submitted on Weds, Nov 17 by 9:30am. Your write up should be 3 pages maximum in NIPS format, not including references (the templates are for LaTex, if you want to use other editors/options please try to get close to the same format). You should describe the results of your first experiments here. Note that, as with any conference, the page limits are strict! Papers over the limit will not be considered.Project Presentation

Project presentations will be by Zoom on Mon, Nov 29 **and Weds, Dec 1** both during class times.  Details to follow.Project Report

Your final submission will be a project report due on Mon, Dec 6 by 11:59pm. Your write up should be 8 pages maximum in NIPS format, not including references (the templates are for LaTex, if you want to use other editors/options please try to get close to the same format). You should describe the task you solved, your approach, the models and algorithms, the results, and the conclusions of your analysis. Note that, as with any conference, the page limits are strict! Papers over the limit will not be considered.