Final Project

ST 2202 | Fall 2019 | University of Virginia

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The final project is an important part of the course. First, it allows you to put into practice what you have been learning and demonstrate your mastery of the course material. But it also is a chance to gain some experience that can be used in future interviews, coursework, and/or research endeavors.

You must come up with your own project idea. Ideally your project will be related to your current interests, internships, jobs, or research. Your final report can be geared to the audience of your choice. There are two types of projects:

1. Data Analysis: use data to address, or if possible solve, an interesting problem using (mostly) R

2. Methodology: develop a new R method or set of functions to help with data analysis (e.g., develop an RStudio addin for reading in fixed width files, create a shiny app).

As a loose guide, the Birth Month Hypothesis case would be around the level of problem you are expected to address.

Form Teams

• 3 people on a team
  • Form teams on Piazza (Search for Teammates!)
  • Due: Thursday at 3pm (Nov 14).
• I may assign people to your group or modify groups if necessary
• If you want to get a job in a certain industry (e.g., sports), do a project that will help you land a job.
• You will give me a review of each team member’s performance
  • Each team member is expected to contribute some code, do some writing, and speak in the presentation.
• Final team assignments will be posted on Friday Nov 15th in class.

Premliminary Report (5%)

• Due: Friday Nov 22nd 9am
• 1 page max (upload to Collab):
  1. Project Name
  2. Names of all team members
  3. What problem are you trying to solve?
  4. Where did/will you get the data?
  5. What approaches will you try to address the problem?
  6. What do you expect to find?
  7. Who is the intended audience?
  8. Include graphics, exploratory data analysis, etc. if available

Presentation (10%)

• In class presentations week of Dec 4th.
• You will have 7 mins to make your presentation and 1 min for questions.
• Tell an interesting story

Final Manuscript and Code (5%)

• Due: Tue Dec 17 at 5pm
• Max of 5 pages. References or appendices don't count toward page limit (but these may not be read).
• Formatting. There are no requirements on formatting. It should be suitable for your intended audience (e.g., a blog or website format is perfectly acceptable; http://www.r-bloggers.com/).
  • If you use a non-page format (like html) then there may not be 5 actual pages; just run it past me.
  • Depending on your target audience, you do not need to show your R code in the final paper. The main purpose of the Project Report is to convey your analysis and results.
  • But you will need to turn in your R code as a separate file(s).
• I would encourage you to make your work and report reproducible (e.g., RMarkdown), but this is not a requirement.
• You will turn in an assessment of each team member and their contribution to the group.
  1. Attended team meetings and/or participated in conversations. [1-5]
  2. What part(s) of project did team member contribute to?
  3. What % of R code did team member write or review?
  4. Overall percent of project attributable to team member? (What % of project did they do?)
  5. Contributed significantly to the success of the project. [1-5]