Final projects

The final project consists of a written report and an oral presentation during class time (dead week and Finals' week).

Here are some past projects from previous classes: Fall 2014, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, and Fall 2020 from previous classes.

In case you are looking for a data set to work with, have a look at Sam Tyner's blog post on a summary of government data sources.

The final project is a team effort. With your team, you have to identify both a topic and a suitable data set. The project has a written component with several stages. A first due date will be after the first week you work on the project, the final write-up is due the week after the Thanksgiving break. The presentation part of the projects consists of either a set of slides with a voice-over or a shiny-app that presents your findings. The topic should be within the realm of general knowledge and interest. You may revisit one of the topics from class, but take care to try to explore VERY different aspects of the topic and make sure to also get additional/other sources for your data.

Data

Minimal requirements to the data used for the project are:
  • The data should have at least 1000 records and several variables (at least 4-5), preferably of different types. This is to ensure, that you will find something of interest in the data.
  • The data set has to be available to the graders (TA and instructor). At a minimum, the data summaries and findings have to be made available to all members of the course.
  • A dataset is automatically excluded from consideration for the project, if it has been published in a textbook or on kaggle unless permission by the instructor is granted. In that case, you have to ensure that the exploration is sufficiently different from the textbook discussion.
  • Tentative schedule

    Date Deliverable
    Week of Oct 30 Identify Team, agree on topic and dataset. Submit project idea and data link for feedback (not graded)
    Week of Nov 6 Submit outline of exploration for feedback (not graded)
    Submit abstract and sign up for presentation slot (for points)
    Week of Nov 27 Submit draft of report for feedback (not graded)
    Prep Week and Finals' Week Project Presentations
    Finals' Week Submit final report