Each student will produce and report on a thoughtful and thorough analysis of a data set. You should start with a research question that relates to your interests. You then should obtain a data set, analyze it (with full consideration of issues including checking your assumptions, model selection, parameter estimation, and prediction), and report on your findings. When thinking about your project, remember our class themes: moving from a question to a model or models, and moving from a model or model(s) to inference. I want to clearly see your thought process.

There will be 2 components to your project: a project plan, a presentation, and a final report. All three of these elements will contribute a total of 30% toward your final grade.

1. Plan

Project plans are due by 11:59 PM on May 10 and constitute 10% of your final grade.

Write an 800-1000 word description of your project idea that includes

  1. background of research
  2. question(s) of interest
  3. hypothesis/hypotheses you’re addressing
  4. predictions from hypotheses
  5. data you will use
  6. your general approach to analyzing the data

Things to consider:

  • What sort of model do you expect to build?
  • Will it be linear or otherwise?
  • Might there be random effects?
  • How will you go about developing one or more models, analyzing them, and making inference?

2. Report

Reports are due by 11:59 PM on June 10 and constitute 25% of your final grade.

Please use the R Markdown report template files for your final report, which will facilitate proper formatting of text, equations, code, figures, references, etc. At a minimum, you will need these two files:

  1. report_template.Rmd

  2. report_title_page_template.tex

You will also need these two files:

  1. jpe.csl

  2. example_refs.bib

if you want to use BibTeX as reference manager for your report. All of these files will need to be located in the same folder or directory. See the report template for instructions.

Please bear in mind that your report should detail a fully reproducible workflow of your analysis. As such, please provide a copy of any necessary data file(s). However, I’ll only consult this as a last resort if there seems to be an error or I can’t seem to work out what you did. Otherwise, all of the relevant information should be contained within your written report. Your report is restricted to 2000 words (exclusive of code chunks and figure/table captions) plus no more than 2 tables and 2 figures, although you should not feel obligated to hit that limit.