Your Course Project:
Your class project is an opportunity for you to explore an interesting machine learning problem of your choice in the context of a real-world data set. Projects can be done by you as an individual, or in teams of two students. Instructors and TAs will consult with you on your ideas, but of course the final responsibility to define and execute an interesting piece of work is yours. Your project will be worth 20% of your final class grade, and will have 4 deliverables:
Proposal:1 page (10%) due Oct 18
Midway Report:3-4 pages (20%) due Nov 8
Final Report: 5-6 pages (40%) due Nov 17
Poster Presentation: (30%) due Nov 21
Note that all write-ups in the form of a NIPS paper (8 pages maximum in NIPS format, including references). The page limits are strict! Papers over the limit will not be considered.
You must turn in a brief project proposal (1-page maximum). Read the list of available data sets and potential project ideas below. You have to use one of these data sets, because we know that they have been successfully used for machine learning in the past.
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.
Papers to read. Include 1-3 relevant papers. You will probably want to read at least one of them before submitting your proposal
Teamate: will you have a teamate? If so, whom? Maximum team size is two students.
Nov 8 milestone: What will you complete by Nov 8? Experimental results of some kind are expected here. You should also describe what portion of the project each partner will be doing.
This should be a 3-4 pages short report, and it serves as a check-point. It should consist of the same sections as your final report (introduction, related work, method, experiment, conclusion), with a few sections `under construction'. Specifically, the introduction and related work sections should be in their final form; the section on the proposed method should be almost finished; the sections on the experiments and conclusions will have whatever results you have obtained, as well as `place-holders' for the results you plan/hope to obtain.
Grading scheme for the project report:
70% for proposed method (should be almost finished)
25% for the design of upcoming experiments
5% for plan of activities (in an appendix, please show the old one and the revised one, along with the activities of each group member)
Your final report is expected to be a 5-6 pages report. It should roughly have the following format:
Introduction - Motivation
Problem definition
Proposed method
Intuition - why should it be better than the state of the art?
Description of its algorithms
Experiments
Description of your testbed; list of questions your experiments are designed to answer
Details of the experiments; observations
Conclusions
กก
We will have all projects presenting a poster, on Project poster session: Mon Nov 21 4-6:30pm in the Newell-Simon Hall Atrium. At least one project member should be present during the poster hours. The session will be open to everybody.