FOUNDATIONS OF DATA SCIENCE

Final Project Proposal

Before you dive into building out your final project, I’d like you to craft a proposal for your project. This should allow you to clarify what you’re looking to build, as well as get feedback on that objective before committing the full time it would take to build it. 

By the time you submit your proposal you should have formed your team and have decided on a dataset with some practical goals other than just analysis. You should clearly state why you are interested in this data, what problems you will try to solve, write some research questions or queries that you will investigate and so on.

The purpose of the proposal is to help you channel your thinking in the right path of what to do, how to do, and how much to do. I will help you with whether it is OK to continue or make some modifications to your proposal. The problem you want to work shouldn’t be too easy, but also shouldn’t be too hard. The dataset should neither be too small (less than 1000), nor extremely large. That’s why at this stage you have tried different datasets, formulated a problem, and finally decided on a data set of your liking. 

The proposal should be approximately one to two pages long and answer the following questions:

· What is the problem you are attempting to solve?

· How is your solution valuable?

· What is your data source and how will you access it?

· Give some background on the data

· What techniques from the course do you anticipate using, and why? 

· What techniques outside the course do you think you will use, and why?

· What do you anticipate to be the biggest challenge you’ll face?

· What research question (queries) are you going to investigate?

When answering these questions you should form a clear picture of the work you intend to do without having begun to build out the infrastructure to execute it yet. You may have written some code, done some initial scraping, or some initial analysis, even some simple models. Do not, however, start to actually build your product until it has been approved.

Submit:

One to two page proposal written in Word