My project for machine learning got handed in on time. It took hours to strip it down from the 8 pages I had when I’d finished to the 6 pages the spec asked for. Careful stripping out of any unnecessary waffle and merging of plots and charts was the order of the day.
I ended up scaling back my plans to explore text mining or ensemble learning to a simple comparison of some of the learning algorithms we learnt about on the course, with some exploration of slightly more advanced statistical comparison methods than we covered. The thinking was that it’d be better to try and demonstrate sound understanding of the basic algorithms and the experimental method – time will tell whether that was the right call.
Unlike how I used to do this kind of work when I was an undergraduate (start with a couple of days to go to deadline), this time I used most of the three weeks allowed to explore the options, work on the software, gather results and produce the paper. Hopefully, the work will show in the result, but I suspect it’s more a case of getting the approach right to minimise the time taken figuring out what to do.
But I guess it’s another example of work expanding to fill the time allowed!
crossedstreams.com 