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%)
  • Final report: 5-8 pages (60%)
  • Project presentation: (30%)

See the course schedule for dates. 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.
  • You should also describe a plan of work and what each team member will be doing.

Project Presentation

Each presentation would have a maximum time limit of 5 minutes. Your project presentation should roughly have the following format:

  • Introduction/motivation
  • Problem definition
  • Proposed method
  • Experiments - description of your testbed; Details of the experiments; observations
  • Conclusions
  • Upcoming experiments/works before final report submission, if any

Final Report

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.

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
  • Clear description of contributions (in case of group project). In case of combined contribution, mention how it started as individual and transitioned into combined work.
  • What changes did you include after the project presentation?