Introduction to Machine Learning
Course Project Information
The course project is an opportunity for you to explore an interesting
machine learning problem of your choice in the context of real-world
data. Projects can be done by you as an individual, or in teams of
two students. The instructor 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 3 deliverables:
- Proposal: 1 page (10%) due March 8th
- Mid-term report: 3-4 pages (30%) due April 19th
- Final report: 6-8 pages (60%) due May 24th
Note that all write-ups must be in the form of an ICML paper (8 pages
maximum in ICML format, including references). The page limit is
strict! Write-ups over the limit will not be considered. Latex and
Word templates for ICML format can be found here.
What Makes a Good Project?
There are typically two types of projects: (1) A student is involved
in ongoing research and identifies
some aspect of the problem on which they are working for which ML
techniques could be useful. (2) A student has some outside interest,
such as playing Texas Hold'em or the stock market, and
identifies/obtains data from that domain that can used to test the
utility of one or more ML algorithms. For example, one could (in
theory) use reinforcement learning to learn to play Texas Hold'em, or
Support Vector Regression to learn to predict the closing price of IBM
stock. In some cases, students identify a research question that is
inherently interesting for ML researchers and work on that question.
Project Proposal
You must turn in a brief project proposal (1 page maximum). Proposals
should include the following information:
- Project title
- Datasets to be used
- Project idea (this should be approximately two paragraphs)
- Software you will use or 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.
- What will you complete for the mid-term report? Experimental
results of some kind are expected here. You should also describe a
plan of work and what each team member will be doing.
Mid-term Report
This should be a 3-4 page short report, and it serves as a
check-point. It should consist of the same sections as your final
report (introduction, related work, method, experiments, conclusions),
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.
This report will be graded as follows:
- 25% for introduction and related work sections
- 50% for proposed method (should be almost finished)
- 20% for the design of upcoming experiments
- 5% for the plan of activities (in an appendix, please show the old one
and the revised one, along with the planned activities of each group
member)
Final Report
Your final report is expected to be a 5-8 page report. It should
roughly have the following format:
- Introduction/motivation
- Problem definition
- Proposed method
- Intuition - why do you expect the proposed method to work?
- Experiments - description of your testbed; list of questions your
experiments are designed to answer
- Details of the experiments; observations
- Conclusions