Q: Do I have to show up to regular course meetings?
A: There is no compulsory attendance during general course meetings. Obviously, it is recommended to attend and actively participate in the meetings. However, there are several deliverables in the context of your project during the semester. Some of them require attendendance.
Q: Do I have to work on weekly exercise sheets like in other courses?
A: No, there won’t be a “voting”/“ticking” procedure. However, for each topic there will be an R Markdown exercise sheet with small programming tasks that you can work on (voluntarily) during and after a meeting.
Q: Where can I find interesting datasets for my project?
A: Here is a list of websites with various real-world datasets:
R data packages that access various web APIsDon’t use a small or built-in dataset like iris, mtcars or Titanic in your project! Also, very popular data sources like Kaggle or the UCI ML repository are deprecated because most of datasets have been extensively studied already.
Q: I’ve no prior programing experience with R? Is that a problem?
A: Programing experience with R is not a mandatory prerequisite. An introduction to the fundamentals of the R language will be given in the second course week. However, please take into account that this introduction cannot cover all details. You are expected to work through additional ressources and materials for yourself or together with your team. Most of the referenced materials are freely available.
Q: Where can I get some inspiration for our project?
A: Please have a look at these excellent projects from the 2018 course.