Submission deadline: November 23, 4pm. Each student must submit an Individual report.
For example projects, see past projects from the Stanford course.. See Project tips for suggestions on the project and report.
The submission should include:
More details on these elements are given below.
On the DICE system, put your files in a folder called
stn_assignment_<your uun>.
The report, the pdf showing examples etc should be in the top level folder, while the program files, scripts etc can be in a subfolder.
The submission command is:
submit stn 1 stn_assignment_<your uun>
This folder should not contain large files like large datasets.
If you are using virtual dice, you should know that in the past virtual dice has had problems executing submissions.
The report should be a 3-4 pages pdf document (including references). Shorter and concise is better! Make sure to describe everything in your own words. Remember to put the title of your project and mention your team. The report should include:
Problem statement. Clearly define what is the problem you were studying. Explain the problem and its importance. Include a mathematical formulation if possible. Keep in mind that the description should be readable by anyone without specialized knowledge.
Related work. Mention any relevant papers and state what problem they are solving and the general approach. Don't describe all the details, just clarify how your work is different.
Your solution/approach. Describe in details your idea for solving the problem. Show why it is different from previous work where possible. Explain why the problem is challenging, explain what your ideas are and justify them. Time may not permit you do everything, in which case explain what you are presenting here and what can be done later.
Results. Describe your results: algorithms, proofs, general arguments and analysis. Give plots, tables that show your results. Discuss them. You need to explain the results and their importance to us. We were not there during the work, so we cannot understand things that you do not explain. Discuss what else can be done on this topic etc.
Appendix. You can attach an appendix of up to 3 pages with any additional plots, results and proofs that might be important. This can include results from your teammate that may be relevant to your discussions. You will not be marked on the appendix, these are reference materials that may help you explain your points better. You can cite material in the appendix from your main report, but keep in mind that we may not read it. So the main report has to be understandable on its own.
This should be readable and well commented. The generally good way to structure it is to write code for important elements: classes, functions etc, and then to call them from different scripts, passing suitable arguments like data file, parameter values etc. ipython notebook may be good for this.
We would like to sometimes run your algorithm to see that it works. So if possible, provide a guideline pdf. This can simply consist of what command to run to which plot. And any comment you would like to include. These examples should be in terms of some small datasets, for example, those you use for testing while writing code.
Including an ipython notebook can be the easy thing to do if you are using ipython.
This should also contain clear instructions on how to run your code on a different dataset if needed.
Ideally, your code should run on DICE. (you don't have to work on it, just try to make sure the code runs.) If it is not possible to run it on DICE, please provide clear instructions on how we may be able to run it on other computers.
Submitting the dataset may be impractical if it is larger than a few megabytes. Please put it in a folder and make the folder readable by all on DICE. This can be done by running the following command from the parent directory:
chmod -R a+r <folder_name>
In your submitted code and example codes above, use the absolute full path to the folder on dice. You can find the path to any directory by running
pwd
From inside the directory. This way, we will be able to run your code on the data without you having to submit the data. Test that this is working before submitting.
The dataset can also contain the small sample datasets for the examples above, and any cleaned/modified.reformatted versions of data you are using.
If your main dataset is too large for storing on your account, please provide the link to the original dataset, or put it on a cloud service and provide that link so that we can download.
You will be marked on trying new ideas, justifying them and explaining clearly. Do not worry about the idea not working well, but make sure to discuss it properly.
Group work:
Writing:
Project management.
You may find yourself short of time. Do not panic! A common mistake is to stick too rigidly to the plan. Think what you can do instead of the original plan.
May be you can run your program on a smaller dataset. May be you can simplify the algorithm so that it does not do exactly the same thing or does not work on all types of data, but does work on some types of data. May be it is solving a slightly different problem from the original one. May be the reason it does not work is an interesting observation in itself.
Instead of worrying that you may not be able to do it, think what you can do. Often, interesting things crop up if you spend a bit of thought. If you keep notes of ideas/possibilities from start, some of them can be useful in a crunch. Your final goal is to submit some kind of an interesting report.
Comparisons.
Deadline October 27 (any time).
The purpose of this plan is to make sure that you are prepared for the project and have some ides to go about doing it.
Submit a 1 page (not more) pdf document for your group. The document should contain:
Additional consideration: How do would you split the work in the team? Who will submit what in final version? Plan this from now. Your marking will be separate. You can include this in the report if you wish
Additional consideration: Computation time. How long will it take to run things on the data? Of course, you cannot know this exactly, but try some simple computations on the data so that you get some idea. You do not need to submit this.
It may not be possible to answer all the questions above perfectly at this stage, but do try to answer them all to save issues later on.
In your project you will have to implement a few techniques/an algorithm built by you or argue mathematically that they could work to solve the problem. You will not be graded on whether your chosen techniques work or not, but on how well you argue that they are suitable to answer the question.
On piazza, there are mulatiple groups for each project. Pick a groups and register -- all members of a team should register for the same group!
Post a note to the group with the pdf as attachment. You can ask questions in the body of the note.