This is a creative paper project that will demonstrate your
thinking about carrying out a real scientific study or deep
upderstanding of a peer-reviewed study by others. If you choose to
conduct a new study, you have to gather, analyze and present the
data, the results and the 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. If you prefer
to review the work of others, select a high-profile journal and an
article of specific interest to you. The article must present real
healthcare applications, data analytics and scientific methods that
you have to understant, review, synthesize, summarize and suggest
next steps in further investigation of the problem. Here 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 assignment policies. No
hand-written reports will be accepted.
- 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:
- 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 Stats 13 (e.g., normal approximation,
confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, linear regression,
analysis of variance, goodness-of-fit, etc.) 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 or two people can work on a project as a team. If
two people work together both must have equally contributed for
the completion and submit separate copies of the project, with
their names on top (the names of both students should be on both
papers). Needless to say expectations of team projects are
higher.
- Help and Examples: