▮ Sharing your findings
In many cases, at the final phase of your data science project, you will need to organize and represent your findings to your audiences through a report as a deliverable. These reports can be in many forms such as a plain Document or a PowerPoint slide. Whatever the format, how you construct your report is crucial because it would be meaningless if all of the information you have discovered through the project are not properly transmitted to the audience.
So for this post, I’d like to share an outline of the elements that a good findings report might include.
▮ Outline
1. Cover Page
The cover page may be one of the most overlooked elements. This should include basic information such as the following.
- Title of the report
- Names of Authors
- Affiliations
- Institutional Publisher
- Date of Publication (Referenced when citing the paper)
2. Executive Summary
This section will be used to briefly explain the details of the findings and should be considered a stand-alone document. The audience should have a sense of what the report is going to be about before embarking on it. The length depends on the length of the report, but in most cases, it should be 3 paragraphs or less.
3. Table of Contents
This would function as a map for your report. Like the “Executive Summary”, this section will help the audience have a sense of what awaits ahead.
4. Introduction
This is where you give further explanation of the background of this data science project so that even people who do not have any prior knowledge can understand what you are researching and keep up with the content you are about to share.
5. Methodology
In this section, you will introduce the research methods and data sources you used for analysis such as the following.
- How did you collect new data?
- How did you split your dataset?
- How did you avoid bias during each process?
- Why did you use the proposed machine-learning algorithm?
6. Results
This is where you present your findings. This section usually starts with descriptive statistics(statistical information about the data you used for analysis; ex. how are the data distributed?) such as the figure below.
Then you will move toward your hypothesis derived from the descriptive statistics and test that hypothesis. Details about your statistical model will be introduced here.
7. Discussion
This section is where you engage with the audience. You craft your main argument by building on the results you have presented in the previous section. You highlight how your findings can help solve a current problem or understand the present situation.
8. Conclusion
In this section, you restate the problem given in the introduction and give an overall summary of the report.
9. Appendix
Information that didn’t fit in the main body of the report, but is important enough to be stated will be recorded in this section.
