Data Mining, 2015 Fall - Projects

Data Mining

Academic year 2015–2016

Course Projects

You have a lot of freedom about the type of project. It can be something that interests you. Maybe a facebook or an Android application you might be interested to design and contains topics related to data mining. If you do research, it may be related to your research. Data mining is a quite broad field, so you may find something that would be of interest to you. If you work for a company, it could be something that may be related to your work there.

In addition, there is available a very large collection of public datasets from various Italian government bodies. They are very interested to see their data being used and analyzed towards something useful.

The following sites can be starting points as they contain links to a lot of public sites that contain data:

http://www.dati.gov.it
http://www.opendatahub.it

You can search the various sites and see what datasets are available.  As you will see, there are various sources and types of data: real-time traffic data, financement, health, culture, ...

What can these data tell us about a problem and how could we use them to do something useful? Search around the data and come up with a project topic that you find interesting. Of particular interest are topics that combine information from more than one datasets.

For instance, a topic that might be of interest might be to look through the http://www.opencoesione.gov.it web site and find a way (possibly by making combined use with other datasets) to evaluate if public projects are successful, in what regions public funds are being used better or worse, and so on. Actually, there is particular interest of such a topic, which and if the project is interesting there may be the possibility for an internship.

There is a huge number of datasets, try to search around and find an interesting problem.

Except for these public data, you may propose something else. A social-network application, some analysis of twitter data toward a particular problem, and so on.

Another option is, if you have some well-thought ideas that you think can improve the algorithms or techniques that we have covered, to discuss them and try to test them.

Procedure:

First you should find a topic. Then email to the instructor your proposal. He will tell you if it is OK or if it is too easy or too hard, and give you suggestions; if needed you can arrange a meeting to discuss.

If you have problems finding a concrete topic, you can contact the instructor with some general ideas, to close down to a problem together.