Why and How to Use Capstone Projects in Machine Learning (ML) for Enhanced Learning

If you are reading this, chances are that you are at a significant point in your career. You are one among the distinct group of professionals, who are already expecting significant disruptions in businesses because of the rapid adoption of emerging technologies. You know how important it is to upgrade yourself to adapt and shape your career in a technology-dominated world. 

ML is among the top emerging technologies, which is seeing several tech professionals thronging to upgrade themselves with desired capabilities. To help them do so, some reputed institutes offer DeepTech programs/courses in ML. But before you opt for any such program, check whether it comes with a hands-on capstone project.

A capstone project often becomes one of the most rewarding experiences of any ML program. It allows you to demonstrate the knowledge and skills you have gained during the ML program.  

What are Capstone Projects?

Capstone Projects form a great tool used by top-breed universities, colleges, and institutes to underline the culmination of a course for a learner. These differ from a thesis or deep-end research paper. In a thesis, one usually works on/around a hypothesis or research area where primary or secondary research is supported with statistical analysis and interpretations. But a Capstone Project is quite distinct. It pushes the learner to squeeze out the real juice and real-life perspective on any area of learning. It encourages a learner to pick an actual problem and efficiently test the course learning. This entails a lot of application-orientation, fieldwork, and original thinking. Capstone Projects are salient mediums to inject some critical skills in a learner. 

• Critical thinking
• Research skills
• Presentation finesse
• Structured approach to a problem
• Questioning
• Soft skills and industry interactions
• Public speaking
• Editing and Packaging

What do you gain from Capstone Projects?

Capstone Projects allow professionals to embrace the course content fully. These projects are designed focusing on nurturing the multifaceted development of learners on a topic. With a good Capstone Project, a learner can comprehend a topic in its entire depth and breadth and apply it in a practical, challenging situation.

If you are still wondering how a Capstone Project would allow you to gain beyond what you have learned during a curriculum, consider this? A Capstone Project will give you a powerful opportunity to showcase multiple competencies to a prospective employer. It will speak louder than your CV. It will be more impressive than any reference that you can cite. It is a portfolio of actual work applications.

Capstone Projects in Machine Learning (ML)

With a robust Capstone Project under your belt, you can show a versatile bundle of abilities in one stroke, especially for a technology topic like ML.

1. Understand a topic or a tool around ML
2. Define a problem area relevant to ML
3. Question critical aspects, boundaries, and context of the problem area
4. Question, map requirements, and plan a good outline
5. Code for ML algorithms and with ML languages
6. See data from an ML application perspective–to handle data, to cleanse data, to remove inconsistencies, to visualize data, and to apply it in the right models
7. Put everything together in a compact presentation
8. Put the work on the table and explain ML to both technical and non-technical audience
9. Find gaps, fix them and think of a tool from a solution angle instead of a theoretical angle or a problem angle of ML

Get Started on ML with Capstone

As you can see now, spending time and rigor on a good Capstone Project will deliver long-term gains for your knowledge, portfolio, career prospects, and future learning curves.

You can start working on a good ML topic, that is,

1. Relevant to today’s challenges
2. Translates your actual course lessons into solutions
3. Demonstrative of your critical skills
4. Robust on data visualization, modeling, and bug-fixing in ML
5. Amenable to the latest tools, frameworks, and libraries in ML
6. Ready to be showcased pragmatically
7. An apt AI/ML use-case for the industry or company you are aspiring for

You can pick various areas that need any  Machine Learning based solution. You can apply them to some real-life industry issues. You can devise solutions around predictive analysis, sentiment analysis, data modeling, fraud detection, pattern recognition, human-less tasks, machine enablement, machine training, reinforcement learning, etc.

Some of the interesting Capstone projects in marketing around ML include 

• Identifying potential customer churn using past customer data
• Building a recommendation system based on customer data
• Sales forecasting based on the effectiveness of promotions
• AI product and content recommendations
• Chatbots to streamline additional requests 
• Visual and voice search tools
• Campaign optimization

With a good application project in place, you would command impressive proficiency in Machine Learning. Start your journey at a place where these opportunities are encouraged and injected through a rich repertoire of mentors, industry partnerships, and field labs.