Math 36600: Final Project

The goal of this project is to use techniques developed in the class to analyze some real world data.

Directions: This project is broken into several pieces.

First you will need to identify a data source and formulate a question (or questions) about that data. You should use publically accessible data, and a likely source of information is a website on the internet. Everyone in the class needs to be working with different data. Try to pick a topic that interests you. Question might include fitting a data to a curve, estimating a quantities related to the data, visualizing data. (15% of the grade)
Second, you will need to get that data into a format Python can understand. You'll want to convert the data into one or more Python lists or dictionaries. (25% of the grade)
Finally, you will need to analyze the data and explain how your analysis will work. This will be done in a Jupyter notebook, making use of Markdown cells to explain how your calculations. Your project should make use of some ideas developed in this course, but you also may use ideas from other classes or other things you know. Even if it is not the main goal of the project, you should try to put some effort into visualizing the data and quantities you want to compute. (60% of the grade)

Examples: Here are things we have done in the course that seem similar to what I might expect for a project.

Analyzing drone data. Based on data from several flights, you could try to figure out based on available data how quickly a drone can accelerate upward, or the maximum velocity of a drone.
Subway ridership data. In the class notebook on Least Squares, we fit subway ridership data to a curve. You could try to do something similar with different data. In Homework 8, you will be asked to fit measured atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to a curve. Something similar to this would also be okay.
COVID-19 Data. Last semester during a practice class, I explained how to access COVID-19 data from Johns Hopkins. See this Jupyter notebook or the web page version. The goal of that notebook was just to visualize the data.