Term Paper

HS650 (Fall 2023) Term Paper Project

(due Wed, Dec 13, 2023)

This is a creative term-paper project that will demonstrate your thinking about conducting a real data-analytic study. Please discuss with colleagues and mentors potential topics and come up with a study where you identify/gather, analyze and present data, results and conclusions that follow from your study. It is completely up to you to come up with an interesting project that you need to submit it by the deadline. Ideally, you will write a report and present a relevant healthcare application along with the data science methods and predictive analytics . Below are the basic requirements your project must satisfy:

• Please submit your project nicely typeset, including text/tables/graphs, in the form according to our HW project submission policies. No hand-written reports will be accepted.
• You can use data from the case-studies on the Canvas site. Examples of projects (this is not an exclusive list):
• Investigate the change of the level of various disinfectants, by-products, contaminants, chemicals, micro-organisms, pesticides, radioactive contaminants or other substances which may be added or naturally occurring in H₂O, across the years (say 1997-2011) in our tap drinking water.
• Study the dynamics of the human populations for the past 100 years. Make predictions for the future.
• Analyze the prevalence or gender preference of one particular type of cancer.
• Study the effects of over fishing.
• Crime rates, geographic distributions and severity.
• Education changes in the past decade.
• Stock market volatility.
• Examples of online resources containing interesting data:
• SOCR Wiki Data Resource SOCR Data.
• DSPA Case-Studies
• Nature Scientific Data.
• Harvard Dataverse Links to an external site.
• US EPA  http://www.epa.gov/safewater/databases/index.html.
• Human Development Reports  http://hdr.undp.org/en/.
• National Center for Health Statistics http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/express.htm.
• Washington State Department of Health  http://www.doh.wa.gov/Data/data.htm.
• Database for Phenotypes and Genotypes (dbGaP).
• UCLA Statistics Department Data Archive: http://www.stat.ucla.edu/data/.
• US Census Bureau (econ, population, geographic, health data) http://www.census.gov/.
• Bureau of Justice Statistics https://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/.
• Statistics Resources Online https://www.lesley.edu/library/guides/research/statistics.html.
• USA Federal Government Data https://www.data.gov.
• Google Public Datasets http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory.
• Format:
• Include the regular HW project cover page. Start with a one paragraph abstract, followed by an intro/background of the problem, methods, results, discussion/conclusion and acknowledgments, references, in that order. Clearly state the problem you have chosen to investigate. List the resources you used to come up with the project and reference all sources you used to complete the project.
• Clearly state your hypotheses, prior to interrogating the data.
• Use statistical techniques from the list of techniques we have discussed in the course to convey whether or not there is statistical evidence in support of your original hypotheses.
• Explicitly state your approach to answer your research hypotheses. Write all formulas/tests/statistics you need.
• Interpret your statistical (numerical) results in a lay back language. Write conclusions and discussions at the end of your report and acknowledge outside help. Describe how this project can be extended in the future.
• One, two or three people can work on a project as a team. If people team up, everyone must contribute equally to the project and all members must submit separate copies of the project, with their names on top (the names of all team members should be on all submissions). Expectations of team projects are higher.
• It's strongly recommended that you design your study, implement your analytic protocol, conduct that modeling, package and report the findings using RMD e-notebook.
• Help and Examples:
  • The UMich Student Journals provide many good writing examples.
  • The SOCR Publications. also provide examples of research reports.
  • UMich Center for Writing.
  • UCLA Graduate Writing Center.

Remember to reserve a time-slot to present your term project.