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. See the
syllabus for dates.
- Proposal: 1 page (10%)
- Final report: 5-8 pages (75%)
- Project presentation: (15%)
Note that all final 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 AAAI format can be found here.
Project proposals have no formatting requirements.
What Makes a Good Project?
There are typically two types of projects: (1) A student is involved
in ongoing research, perhaps for an MS of Ph.D. degree, 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.
The last time I offered this course, one of the students did a project
of this type that was ultimately published at AAAI.
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 is your plan of work? What will each team member be doing?
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