Visualization for Machine Learning

Spring 2024

Acknowledgement

This presentation is heavily influenced and borrows directly from Prof. Christopher Manning’s Stanford cs224n project discussion.

The Final Project

You either:

  • Do the default project (more on this later)

  • Propose your own final project, which we must approve

    • For this, you will need a mentor (TA/prof/postdoc/PhD)

You can work in teams 1-3. Teams are encouraged. Obviously, more is expected from a team than an individual.

Custom Final Projects

  • You will need to talk to me or one of the following people about approval for a custom project:

    • Erin McGowan
    • Vitoria Guardiero
    • Guande Wu
    • Joao Rulff
    • Parikshit Solunke

  • If you intend to do one, please reach out immediately.

Why Choose the Default Final Project (DFP)

  • If you have limited experience with research, don’t have a clear idea of what you want to do, or need guidance and a goal… Then do the default final project!

  • Considerations:

    • The final project will give you more guidance, scaffolding, and clear goals to aim at
    • The path of success is not to do something that looks weak compared to what you could have done with the DFP

Why do Custom Final Project (CFP)?

  • If you
    • Have some research project that you’re very excited about, which involves the class topics
    • You want to try something on your own
    • You want to see more of the process of defining your own research goal, finding data and tools, etc
  • Then
    • Do the custom project

Gamesmanship

  • DFP are a more guided option, but it’s not that they’re less work
  • DFP are also open-ended projects where you can explore different approaches and your own creativity.
  • There are great DFP and great CFP… and weak DFP and CFP.
  • We will be giving a Best Project Award for each type of project (assuming quantify and quality of entries)

Project Proposal

  • Find a relevant (key) research paper for your topic
    • For DFP, those are provided
  • Write a summary of that research paper and what you took away from it as key ideas that you hope to use
  • Write what you plan to work on, and how you can innovate in your final project
  • Describe as needed, in particular for CFP.
    • Project plan, relevant existing literature, data that you will use, how you will evaluate your work

Project Proposal

  • Skill: How to think critically about a research paper
    • What were the main novel contributions?
    • Is the work general and reusable or a special case?
    • Are there flaws or neat details in that they did?
    • How does it fit with other papers on similar topics?
    • Does it provoke good questions on further or different things to try?

Project Proposal

  • How to do a good job on your project plan?
    • You need to have an overall sensible idea
    • But most project plans are lacking in nuts-and-bolts:
      • Do you have your data? Can you collect it quickly?
      • Do you have a realistic evaluation plan? Is it convincing?
      • Do you have appropriate baselines?

Project Writeup

  • Writeup quality is very important to your grade!

Sample Project

Sample Project

Sample Project

Plan To Use It in Your Portfolio

Plan To Use It in Your Portfolio

  • https://github.com/VIDA-NYU/pycalibrate

  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.13770.pdf

https://cds.nyu.edu