Tips for Udacity Machine Learning Engineering Nanodegree Capstone Project
Adding a personal touch
The best capstone project gives a brief intro about why this project is relevant to the world as well as relevant to the author on a personal level. After a while, all the capstone projects start to look similar, the ones with meaning and goals really stand out. Remember the hobbyist who is a son of a cucumber farmer in Japan? Because there are so many types of cucumbers, who would have thought, that look very similar, he invented a Tensorflow based cucumber sorter for his boutique, family farm of many generations. Bizarre story, very meaningful, very memorable. Was featured in Google Cloud Next conference.
Brainstorming Capstone Ideas
Use www.kaggle.com a data science competition website for inspirations, datasets and example jupyter notebooks. Learn from the top competitors how to do exploratory data analysis, clean and preprocess data.
Another great destination for machine learning datasets is the UCI Machine Learning Repository where you can find datasets on abalones, heart problems, diabetes, image vision and more. Get the datasets from UCI and do a search on Kaggle for similar datasets and read the jupyter notebooks for inspirations and improvements.
There is no way your mentor knows every field the student comes up with, so it’s good to learn from specialists on Kaggle.
