Final projects

The final project consists of a written report and an oral presentation during class time to be recorded and shared through canvas.

Some past projects from Stat 480 students.

Schedule:

Date	Deliverable
April 7	Identify Team, agree on topic and dataset. Submit project idea and data link for feedback (not graded)
April 16	Submit outline of exploration for feedback (not graded)
April 23	Submit draft of report for feedback (not graded)
April 30	Submit project presentations
May 5	Submit project presentation evaluations
May 7 (Thursday)	Submit final report

Final project guidelines:

• The final project is a team effort.
• Teams will consist of 3-5 students with the larger the group the longer the written component and presentation will be expected to be.
• With your team, you have to identify both a topic and a suitable data set. (see below)
• The topic should be within the realm of general knowledge and interest.
• You may revisit one of the topics from class, but take care to try to explore VERY different aspects of the topic and make sure to also get additional/other sources for your data.
• The project has a written component with several stages.
• A first draft is due after the first week you work on the project.
• The next draft is due April 23rd.
• The final write-up is due May 7th.

Data requirements:

• The data should have at least 1,000 records and several variables (minimum of 5), preferably of different types. This is to ensure that you will find something of interest in the data.
• The data set has to be available to the graders (TA and instructor). At a minimum, the data summaries and findings have to be made available to all members of the course.
• A dataset is automatically excluded from consideration for the project, if it has been published in a textbook unless permission by the instructor is granted. In that case, you have to ensure that the exploration is sufficiently different from the textbook discussion.

Useful data sources:

Link	Description
	Sam Tyner's blog post on a summary of government data sources.
	BuzzFeedNews GitHub
	The Economist GitHub
	Data is Plural collection
	The fivethirtyeight data package
	The Upshot by NY Times
	The Baltimore Sun Data Desk
	The LA Times Data Desk
	Open News Labs
	BBC Data Journalism team