Project

The goal of the project is to apply and extend the skills acquired during the course while working on a data analysis project of your choice. Your task is to obtain data, analyze it and display the obtained results in clear graphs and tables. It is ideal if you obtain interesting or useful conclusions, but we will mainly evaluate your choice of suitable methods and technical difficulty of the project. The scope of programming or data analysis should correspond to roughly three homework assignments, but overall the project will be more demanding, because unlike assignments, you are not provided with data and a sequence of tasks, but you have to come up with them yourself, and the first ideas do not always work. You will also have to document your work in a written report.

The emphasis should be on tools run on the command line and the use of technologies covered during the course, but if needed, you can supplement them by other methods. While prototyping your tool and creating visualizations for your final report, you may prefer to work in interactive environments such as the Jupyter notebook, but in the submitted version of the project, most of the code should be in scripts runnable from the command line, potentially excluding the final visualization, which can remain as a notebook or an interactive website (flask).

Project can be done by pairs of students, however the project should be then bigger. Each student should be primarily responsible for some parts of the project and the division of labor should be listed in the project report. Pairs submit only one project, but the oral exam is separate for each student.

Project proposal

In roughly two thirds of the semester, you will submit a project proposal with length of about half a page. In this proposal, state what data you will process, how you will collect it, what the purpose of the analysis is and what technologies you plan to use. You can slightly change the goals and technologies as you work on the project, but you should have an initial idea. We will give you feedback on the proposal, and in some cases it may be necessary to change the topic slightly or completely. For a suitable project proposal submitted on time, you will receive 5% of the total grade. We recommend consulting the instructors before submitting the proposal.

How to submit the proposal: copy a file in txt alebo pdf format to /submit/proposal/username on the course server.

Typical scheme of a project

Most projects consist of the following stages which should also be represented in the report

• Acquiring data. This can be easy if someone gives you the data or if you download it from internet as a single file. It can also be more difficult if you need to parse the data from many data files or webpages. Do not forget to check if the data was downloaded correctly (at least by manually checking several records). The project report (in combination with protocol) should clearly indicate where and how you obtained the data.
• Preprocessing data to a suitable form. This stage involves parsing input formats, selecting useful data, checking them for correctness, filtering incomplete records etc. Store your data set in a file or database suitable for further processing. Do not forget to check if data seems to be correct. In the report, include basic characteristics of the data such as the overall number of records, attributes of each record and value ranges for these attributes etc. This will help the reader to understand the character of your data set.
• Further analyses and data visualization. At this stage try to arrive at interesting or useful conclusions. The results can be static figures and tables or an interactive webpage in flask. However, even for an interactive webpage include selected results in the report as static images.

If your project significantly differs from this scheme, consult the instructors.

Project topics

• You can process some data useful for your bachelor or master thesis or data necessary for another course (in that case mention in the report which course it is and also notify the instructors of the other course that you have used results from this course). For DAV and BIN students, this project can be a good opportunity to select a topic of the bachelor thesis and start working on it.
• You can try to find someone who needs to process some data set but does not have the necessary skills (this could be scientists from different fields, non-profit organizations or even companies). If you contact third parties in this way, it is especially important that you try to produce the best project you can, in order to maintain the good reputation of your study program.
• In your project, you can compare speed or accuracy of several programs for the same task. The project will consist of preparing the input data for the programs, support for automated running of the programs and evaluation of results.
• You can also try to replicate an analysis published in a scientific paper or a blog. You can check if you obtain the same results as the original authors and try variations of the original analysis, such as trying different parameters, changing settings, adding new visualizations etc.
• You can also find interesting data on the internet and analyze them. Students often choose topics related to their hobbies and activities, such as sports, computer games, programming contests, music, cooking etc. Many successful projects involve scrapping such data from some websites.

Not recommended:

• We do not recommend choosing a dataset from Kaggle or a similar site.
• Many of these datasets are dubious, submitted by anonymous users without a good explanation of where the data came from. If you do use a dataset from Kaggle, make sure you research its background thoroughly so that you can convince us that it is trustworthy.
• Another problem is that these datasets are usually already preprocessed. Thus work related to this course is mostly done and it is hard to find suitable tasks for the project.
• Finally, many of these datasets already have many analyses done and published, so why add more to an already large pile?

Use of AI code generation

• Some editors provide options for automated code generation based on context or comments.
• On the project, you are allowed to use such tools (but not on the homework).
• If you use such features, make sure you closely examine any generated code and correct any mistakes. You should understand how the code works and test it thoroughly. On the oral exam, we will check if you can explain how your code works and to modify it.
• Acknowledge any such tools used in the resources section of your protocol.

Submitting projects

Similarly as for homeworks, submit the required files to the specified folder. Submit the following:

• Your programs and data files (do not submit large data above 50Mb or sensitive data such as personal information)
• Protocol in txt format with brief notes similarly as for homeworks. If should contain
  • a list of submitted files with brief descriptions
  • detailed steps done in data analysis (commands used)
  • explanation how your script can be run by somebody else (if relevant), including steps for installing any non-standard libraries used
  • list of resources used (data, programs, documentation and other literature etc.)
• Project report in pdf format. Unlike the less formal protocol, the report should be a coherent text written in a technical style. You can write in English or Slovak, but avoid grammar mistakes. The report should contain the following information:
  • an introduction explaining goals of the project and necessary background from the area you work in,
  • a description of your data, including where and how it was obtained and what it contains,
  • a brief method description which does not contain details of individual steps but rather overview of the method and its justification,
  • results of your analysis (tables, graphs etc.), description of these results and discussion about conclusions that can be made from your results,
  • a conclusion where you discuss which parts of the project were difficult and what problems you have encountered, which parts you have in contrast were able to do easily, which parts you would recommend in retrospect to do differently, what you have learned during the project etc.
  • Additional recommendations for the report:
    • Do not forget to explain the meaning of individual tables and graphs (axes, colors etc.).
    • Include the final results as well initial exploration of your data and analyses that you have used to verify correctness of the data and your analysis method.
    • You can interleave results and methods or keep them separate.