Project proposal

Due: March 22, 2021

The goal of this assignment is to get you rhinking about your final project. I would like a short (1-2 page) proposal of what you would like to do, and with whom you plan to work. Groups of 1-3 are fine, but should ideally be fixed for the remainder of the project.

How to choose a project

The project is deliberately open-ended. If you can find some way to use this to advance your own research agenda, that’s great! Or if you just want to pick up something new, that is fine as well. Your project can involve a theoretical contribution, such as developing and analyzing a new numerical method; or more empirical, such as evaluating a few methods on some interesting data sets. I hope some of the class projects might turn into conference papers, but this is certainly not a requirement to have a successful project.

Your project should include:

  1. A numerical method (broadly construed) and some mathematical discussion. You don’t need to prove new theory, but you do need to be able to discuss the mathematical ideas.

  2. A concrete data analysis problem that you want to solve. In many cases, this will mean a real world (non-synthetic) data set. If your project involves solely synthetic data, you should try to outline why in your proposal.

You should plan to demonstrate the method (or methods) on the problem. This will probably mean coding, though ou don’t need to re-implement methods from scratch if existing libraries suffice.

Proposal ingredients

Please let me know in 1-2 pages:

  • Who will be working on the project (names and netids)
  • What questions you want to answer
  • How you will proceed (who does what? what is the first step?)
  • How the above two points (numerical method and data analysis) will be part of your project

Include references to other papers where appropriate.

Submission guidelines

Your paper should be properly typeset and submitted as a PDF on Canvas. You can work on and submit in teams of size 1-3; these do not need to be the same as for your reaction paper. Please include all of the team member names and netids on the submission.