STA/OPR 9750 - Final Project

In lieu of exams, STA/OPR 9750 has an end-of-semester project, worth 40% of your final grade. This project is intended to showcase the data analysis technologies covered in this course, including - but not limited to:

The project will be graded out of a total 400 points, divided as follows:

Projects can be completed in groups of 3-5 students.1 All group members are responsible for all portions of the work and will receive the same grade, except on the individual evaluation.

Group Membership: By 2024-10-02 at 11:45pm ET, email the instructor with a list of group members, cc-ing all group members. Once the original email is sent, other group members must reply acknowledging their intention to work with this group. After this date, group membership may only be changed for extraordinary circumstances.

Project Proposal Presentations

On Thursday October 10, 2024, project teams will present a 6 minute project proposal in the form of an in-class presentation. This presentation must cover:

  • The animating or overarching question of the project: e.g., “Is MTA subway and bus service less reliable in poorer areas of NYC?”

  • Public data sources you intend to analyze (at least two): e.g., MTA on-time arrival statistics by station and household income data by ZIP code.2 The presentation should include a brief discussion of what relevant data elements these sources provide; note that this discussion should be selective and informative, not simply a list of column names.

  • Specific questions you hope to answer in your analysis: e.g.

    1. average arrival delay by station;
    2. average household income for families nearest to each station; and
    3. which routes are busiest at which time of day.

    There should be (at least) one specific question per group member. (This forms part of your individual evaluation.) Regardless of the size of your group, there need to be at least three specific questions.

  • Rough analytical plan: e.g., we plan to divide NY up into regions based on nearest subway station and to compute average household income within those regions; we will correlate those income statistics with average MTA service delays in the direction of work-day travel; finally, we will use arrival data to identify portions of the MTA network where delays tend to occur.

  • Anticipated challenges: e.g. how to disentangle the effect of being further away from the central business district (and delays accumulating) from specific socioeconomic effects; or lack of historical data going back further than 1 year.

  • List of team members

This presentation will be graded out of 50 points, divided as:

  • Quality of presentation (10 points): Are slides clearly designed making effective use of visual elements? Does oral presentation supplement the slides or simply read text on slide?

  • Clarity of motivating question (15 points): Is the key question clearly stated and fully motivated? Is the question designed with sufficient specificity to both:

    1. be feasible within the project scope; and
    2. be of genuine interest?

  • Quality of proposed data sources (5 points): are the data sources proposed sufficient to answer the question?

  • Quality of specific questions (10 points): how well do the specific questions support the motivating question? Do they take full advantage of the proposed data sources?

  • Timing of presentation (10 points): Does the project proposal actually take 6 minutes (not going over!)? Presentations that are too short (less than 5.5 minutes) or too long (more than 6.5 minutes) will be penalized in proportion to violation of the 6 minute limit.

At this point, only the “animating question” and team roster are locked. If you discover alternate data sources, better specific questions, or superior analytical strategies that help better address the animating question, you may (and should!) change your project plan.

In the interest of time, it is not required that all team members present.

Peer Feedback

After project proposal presentations, peer feedback will be required. The format and platform used for this feedback will be determined and announced by the instructor.

Peer feedback will be due on Wednesday October 16, 2024.

Peer feedback will be meta-reviewed as part of the individual grade.

Mid-Semester Check-In Presentations

On Thursday November 07, 2024, project teams will present a 6 minute check-in in the form of an in-class presentation. This presentation must cover:

  • The animating or overarching question of the project.
  • Public data sources you are in the process of analyzing (at least two). At this point, the description of the used data sources should include critical evaluation of both data quality and data relevance to the overarching question. In particular, teams should be able to describe
    relevant challenges and how, if possible, the team overcame those challenges.
  • Specific questions you hope to answer in your analysis. At this point, each specific question should be assigned to a single team member. While the specific questions work together to answer the overarching question, they should also be sufficiently distinct to allow individual evaluation.
  • Relevant prior art: what prior work has been done on this topic? How does the project complement and contrast with this work?
  • Anticipated challenges: e.g. how to disentangle the effect of being further away from the central business district (and delays accumulating) from specific socioeconomic effects; or lack of historical data going back further than 1 year.

This presentation will be graded out of 50 points, divided as:

  • Quality of presentation (10 points): Are slides clearly designed making effective use of visual elements? Does oral presentation supplement the slides or simply read text on slide?
  • Analysis of proposed data sources (15 points): are the data sources proposed sufficient to answer the question? Has the team begun to analyze the existing data in an exploratory fashion, determining the degree to which it is comprehensive (representing an unbiased, and ideally full, sample of a relevant population) and internally consistent (are the data well recorded or do they have tell-tale signs of inaccuracy)?
  • Quality of specific questions (10 points): how well do the specific questions support the motivating question? Do they take full advantage of the proposed data sources?
  • Engagement with Relevant Literature (10 points): how well does the team ground their project in relevant academic publications and/or reputable news media reports?
  • Timing of presentation (5 points): Does the project proposal actually take 6 minutes (not going over!)? Presentations that are too short (less than 5.5 minutes) or too long (more than 6.5 minutes) will be penalized in proportion to violation of the 6 minute limit.

At this point, both the overarching and specific questions should be essentially “locked.” While you may adjust the specific questions between now and the final report, you will be asked to justify deviation.

In the interest of time, it is not required that all team members present.

Peer Feedback

After mid-semester presentations, peer feedback will be required. The format and platform used for this feedback will be determined and announced by the instructor.

Peer feedback will be due on Wednesday November 27, 2024.

Students are strongly encouraged to complete their peer feedback promptly and not wait until the day before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Peer feedback will be meta-reviewed as part of the individual grade.

Final Presentations

On Thursday December 12, 2024, student teams will present a 10 minute final presentation describing their project. This presentation must cover:

  • The animating question of the project: this is essentially a restatement from the prior presentations, though it may be refined in light of work performed.
  • Prior art
  • Data sources used: if you changed data - or used additional data - explain what motivated the change from your original plan. Describe any difficulties you encountered in working with this data.
  • Specific analytical questions (and answers) supporting the animating question. Describe the major analytical stages of your project and summarize the results.
  • Summary of overall findings: relate your specific analytical questions to your motivating question; describe limitations of the approach used.
  • Proposals for future work: if this work could be continued beyond the end of the semester, what additional steps would you suggest to a client / boss?

All team members must present part of this presentation and each team member must present on their specific question.

This presentation will be graded out of 100 points, divided as:

  • Quality of presentation (20 points): are slides clearly designed to make use of attractive and effective visual elements? Does the oral presentation supplement the slides or simply read text on slide?
  • Relationship of motivating and specific questions (10 points): Are the specific questions well-suited for the motivating question? Does the team address limitations of their analysis? Does the motivating question lead naturally to the specific questions?
  • Discussion of data sources (20 points): How well does the team describe the data used for the analysis - its size, structure, and provenance - and why it is suitable for their motivating question?
  • Communication of findings (25 points): are the visualizations in the presentation effective at communicating statistical findings? Does the team effectively communicate limitations and uncertainties of their approach?
  • Contextualization of project (15 points): is the project well situated in the existing literature? Are the findings of the specific questions well integrated to answer the overarching question?
  • Timing of presentation (10 points): Does the project proposal actually take 10 minutes (not going over!)? Presentations that are too short (less than 9.5 minutes) or too long (more than 10.5 minutes) will be penalized.

Final Summary Report

By the last day of class (2024-12-14 at 11:45pm ET), the team will post a summary project report of no more than 2000 words summarizing their findings. This is a “non-technical” document, suitable for someone who cares about the motivating question, not for a data scientist. This document should focus on i) motivations and importance of analysis; ii) briefly how the specific analyses help to address the motivating question; iii) the choice of data used, including discussion of any limitations; iv) visualization of most important findings; v) relation to prior work (“the literature”); and vi) potential next steps.

Furthermore, this document should link to individual reports (more detail below) which work through the project specific questions in detail. Students are responsible for ensuring stable links between postings throughout the grading window.

This report should be written using quarto and formatted as a web page, submitted using the same process as the course mini-projects. This document is not required to be a “reproducible research” document since it is “non-technical”. As a general rule, this is a “words and pictures” document-possibly including a few tables-not a “code” document. You are encouraged to re-use material from your final presentation. Students are encouraged to re-use one or two key figures from individual reports in this document; there is no “disadvantage” to not having one of your individual figures used here. It is more important to select the right figures for the report.

For portfolio purposes, students are encouraged to each post a copy of the summary report to their own web presence, though this is not required.

This summary document will be graded out of 75 points, divided as:

  • Clarity of writing and motivation (50 points): is the report written accessibly for a non-technical audience? Is the motivating question well-posed and supported by the specific questions? Do the authors engage with prior work on this topic well?
  • Clarity of visuals (25 points): are visuals chosen to support the overall narrative? Are they “basic static” plots or have the authors gone “above and beyond” in formatting and structure? Do they clearly convey relevant uncertainty and key analytic choices?

Final Individual Report

By the last day of class (2024-12-14 at 11:45pm ET), each team member will post an individual project report of no more than 2000 words summarizing their work the individual specific question(s) for which they were responsible.3

This is a “technical” document and should be structured as a “reproducible research” document, including all code needed to acquire, process, visualize, and analyze data. (Code does not count towards word counts) This report should be written using quarto and formatted as a web page, submitted using the same process as the course mini-projects.

Once both the summary and individual reports are submitted, students should open a new GitHub issue, tagging the instructor and linking to both reports using the template below:

Hello @michaelweylandt!

My team is ready to submit our STA/OPR 9750 course project reports. You can
find mine at: 

- Summary Report: [http://link.to.my/summary_report.html](http://link.to.my/summary_report.html)
- Individual Report: [http://link.to.my/individual_report.html](http://link.to.my/individual_report.html)

Thanks,
@<MY_GITHUB_NAME>

The final individual report will graded out of 125 points, with 100 points dedicated to the report it self and 25 points based on peer evaluations meta-review of peer feedback. The 100 points will be divided roughly as follows:

  • Code quality (20 points)
  • Data acquisition and processing (20 points)
  • Data analysis (30 points)
  • Communication and presentation of results (30 points)

Note that the individual reports may cross-reference each other and share code (suitably attributed) as appropriate. Students are encouraged to consider this project as a “series of posts” on a suitably technical blog.

The following rubric will be used to assess the final individual report:

Individual Report Rubric
D C B A
Code Quality
  • The code runs on the instructor’s machine without errors

Everything mentioned before and:

  • The code is well organized, with good variable names and use of functions (subroutines) to avoid repeated code.
  • The code is well- formatted
  • The code uses comments effectively
  • Code is written efficiently, making use of R’s vectorized semantics

Everything mentioned before and:

  • Code is organized into sub-routines that could be easily adapted to support other analyses (not overly specific to the particular data being analyzed

Everything mentioned before and:

  • Code is suitable to be re-used for similar analyses without effort, e.g., in an R package.
Data Acquisition and Processing

  • The code loads data from a static file; or

  • The code dynamically loads data from a static web-based data source

Everything mentioned before and:

  • The code uses a dynamic API or basic web-scraping techniques to download data

Everything mentioned before and:

  • The code fully prepares and cleans the data, including properly handling any outliers, missing data, or other irregularities.

Everything mentioned before and:

  • The code acquires data using techniques not presented in class, such as headless browsers, logging into to password protected resources using a httr session, or scraping data from non-tabular HTML
Data Analysis The analysis consists primarily of basic descriptive statistics

Everything mentioned before and:

  • Advanced descriptive statistics
  • Basic “pre-packaged tests” used for all inferential statistics

Everything mentioned before and:

  • A computer-based inference strategy such as bootstrapping, permutation testing, or cross validation is used

Everything mentioned before and:

  • Sophisticated computer-based inference exceeding techniques presented in class
Communication and Presentation of Results
  • A static Markdown document or presentation with basic graphics and tables
  • “Baseline” graphics that do not adapt the default formatting or styling

Everything mentioned before and:

  • Advanced/interactive graphics
  • “Publication quality” graphics using advanced plotting functionality

Everything mentioned before and:

  • A basic interactive dashboard

Everything mentioned before and:

  • A fully-interactive “dashboard” type product that reacts to data in real-time and allows for customizable visualization and/or data export

Instructions on the final 25 points will be distributed at a later time. Students will be evaluated by their teammate on their overall contribution to the project.

Footnotes

  1. If desired, students can work in pairs or even individually. That “team” is still responsible for a minimum of three specific questions, so you will have to do extra work if you have a team of fewer than 3 people.↩︎

  2. More properly, you would want to use Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) for this sort of analysis. The distinction is subtle, but while all ZCTAs have geographic extents, not all zip codes do. For example, there are dedicated zip codes for the IRS and the Department of Defense that have no associated geographic boundaries. Most open data sources will omit this distinction, but if you see it, you should be aware of it.↩︎

  3. If students choose to take on multiple specific questions (perhaps because they were in a small group or if a classmate had to drop the course), they may submit multiple individual reports (one per question). If doing so, please modify the GitHub message template to link all reports.↩︎