FAQ

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 attendance.

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Q: Where can I find interesting datasets for my project?
A: Here is a list of websites with various real-world datasets:

• curated list of “awesome” public datasets
• companies:
  • Registry of Open Data on AWS
  • Microsoft Research Open Data
  • Google Public Data
• governments:
  • EU Open Data
  • German open data portal
  • US Government open data
• List of R data packages that access various web APIs
• FiveThirtyEight
• “100+ Interesting Data Sets for Statistics”

Don’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.

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Q: I’ve no prior programming experience with R? Is that a problem?
A: Programming 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.

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Q: Where can I get some inspiration for our project?
A: Please have a look at these excellent projects from the 2018 and 2020 courses.