The course project is 30% of the final grade (max project team size: TBD). A list of project ideas will be released in the first month of the course; however, you are welcome to come up with your own project.

Projects typically fall into one of the following categories:

  • Building models/simulators and evaluating to what extent the simulated data capture problems of real data
  • Conducting an in-depth study of a method not covered in-depth during class, including (basic) implementation and evaluation
  • Benchmarking several methods, ideally under interesting and biologically relevant model conditions, with the goal of identifying gaps in method performance (and thus future research directions)
  • Developing/improving methods, with the goal of improving accuracy (note: it's helpful to have previously identified some data sets where methods perform poorly)
  • Developing/improving methods, with the goal of improving scalability or parallel efficiency (and either not reducing or else improving accuracy)
  • Analyzing biological data sets (this option is typically reserved for students in Biological Sciences graduate program)

The following questions should be addressed by in your project proposal.

  • What is the objective of your project, that is, what do you hope to achieve and why?
  • What is the high-level approach that you are taking and why?
  • What resources do you need to complete your project (data sets, compute resources, etc.) and do you have access to them?
  • What is the overall project plan? (note: consider task dependencies, responsibilities of each team member, and time frame.)
  • How will you evaluate success?
  • What are the anticipated results of your project?
  • What are some potential challenges that you might encounter?
  • What is the minimal viable project that you expect to be able to complete. In other words, if you encounter the challenges above, what will you write your report about?
  • What are the expected contributions of each team member?
  • What makes your project novel in comparison to prior studies?
  • How does your project relate to the course material?

Come talk to me during drop-in hours if you have questions or want to bounce ideas around.