Week 9: So Much to Say but How Do I Say It?

Hi Guys! Welcome to week 9 of my internship! There are only a couple weeks left until our final presentation, so I’ve spent this week finalizing the models and actually formalizing all this work I’ve been doing into a presentation! I determined that I am going to be comparing the three models I’ve been focused on the most which include: Linear Regression, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and Support Vector Regression! Without spoiling too much of my final presentation: in order to compare them and assess how feasible they would be for in-field detection of trace narcotics, I came up with a criteria(and corresponding test sets) to assess them on, and will be running the models through the tests a couple of times and then analyzing the results to see which model is best! I’ve just finished running the tests and I have so many excel sheets and scatter plots and ROC curves just filled with data! This is my first time doing an actual ‘data-driven’ research project and I’m finding it just a bit tricky to determine the best ways to actually present my findings in a way that’s concise and easy to follow along! I’m considering doing some sort of statistical test to compare the model performances (maybe a t-test?) and seeing how that goes. I think I’m also going to look more into how other people in the machine learning world have been comparing model performances to see if I can get any hints from that!

Looking forward, I hope to have my slides finalized by Wednesday of next week and then my final presentation for my colleagues at work on the Tuesday after that! Time certainly seems to be flying but I’m so excited to share everything that I’ve been doing!

Until next time,

Natasha