732A76 Research Project

Course information

The aim of this course is to give the student the opportunity to

• apply methods from statistics, machine learning, or data mining in a real setting,
• plan, perform and report on an individual task, and
• discuss research and development work in statistics, machine learning or a related area.

The student is supposed to join an ongoing project or research in statistics, machine learning, or data mining leaded by some IDAs researcher and study the origin of the problem and the research related to it, and analyze the given problem by using methods and tools from statistics or machine learning. The project is supposed to be research related, and after the course the students are supposed to get a better understanding of what research work implies. Accordingly, the project proposals defined by students themselves will not be accepted by default (with a rare exception of when the project is of interest for some of the IDAs researchers and the researcher is explicitly willing to invest time in this student formulated project).

The course runs on 20% rate and is worth 6 ECTS credits and, thus, the course workload corresponds approximately to 1 working day per week during the entire semester (16 weeks). The project is assumed to be performed with a very limited help from supervisor, up to 3 hours in total. The project is supposed to result in a report containing around 3-4 pages and some other material requested in the project description; this report must be sent to the supervisor and to the course leader at latest on 3rd of January 2025. An oral presentation of the results should also be performed for the supervisor.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Find a research project. A list of the projects will be available in LISAM. If you are interested in research of a particular IDA researcher and there is no project in the list from this person, you may contact him/her by email and ask if he/she can provide you such a project. If you find a project in this way, send the title, a short description (appr. 3 sentences) and the name of the supervisor via email to the course leader (frank.miller [at] liu. se).
2. Sign up for the project of your choice on LISAM (see Signup) between 26th and 30th of August 2024 and contact your supervisor. All projects that are/will be published at LISAM will be approved.
3. Do the job. There will be no lectures or other scheduled course sessions you are only performing the given task with a very limited support from your supervisor. The supervisor will basically do a short introduction to the project and then you will probably have some mail conversations/very short meetings where you can ask some questions related to your project. Your work on the project will thus be almost independent by default.
4. Write a final report containing approximately 3-4 pages that describes the background, the problem and your results and send the report to the course leader and your supervisor at latest on 3rd of January 2025.
5. You are also supposed to make a short presentation for your supervisor in order to report your results. Decide some date and time for this with your supervisor: the presentation should be done before 17th of January 2025.
6. Ask the supervisor to send a message to the course leader proposing a grade (A-F) and a short motivation for this grade (3-4 sentences).
7. Get the grade: the grade (A-F) will be heavily based on the feedback from your supervisor.
8. If you are delayed with your report and/or your presentation, the last submission opportunity will be on 6th of March 2025 and the presentation should be done before 20th of March 2025, but your grade will be decreased due to inability to fit the ordinary time frames. This means that the maximum grade you can obtain will be "C". The course leader's email is: frank.miller [at] liu. se
9. If you are unable to fit the time frames indicated in step 8, you will be requested to start a new project when the course starts next time (August 2025).

Page responsible: Maryna Prus
Last updated: 2024-04-23