This document outlines thesis projects for the bachelor’s degree in mathematics or mathematics-economy at the University of Copenhagen. If there are less than 5 students, only one project will be offered. Which one depends on the interests of the majority.

There will be an info meeting on Monday, January 23, 15:15-16:45, in Auditorium 3 at HCØ.

Formalities

The thesis is written during block 3 and block 4, 2023. The start date is February 6 and the thesis is handed in on June 9. There is a subsequent oral defense.

Regarding the contract

Use the project descriptions below and take a look at the suggested literature to come up with a proposed title and description. We will then read and comment on your proposal and approve it afterwards. Fill out the contract formular, send the pdf to , and we will submit it. Remember to sign the contract. Here follows some information that needs to go into the contract.

The meeting frequency will be in groups once every second week for 1,5 hours during block 3 and in block 4 there will be individual meetings. In the block 3 group meetings, you (the students) will present some of the background literature and theory, and we will have time for questions, both general questions as well as questions specific to what we are reading. The block 4 meetings will be individual meetings by default. There will be 4 group meetings (for each subject) and 3 individual meetings of 30 minutes. The first group meeting will be in week two of the block, so you have the first week to read and prepare for the presentation at the group meeting. The individual meetings can be onsite or on zoom.

As a student you are expected to be prepared for the meetings by having worked on the material that was agreed upon. If you have questions you are expected to have prepared the questions and be prepared to explain what you have done yourself to solve the problems. In particular, if you have questions regarding R code, you are expected to have prepared a minimal, reproducible example (specifics for R examples).

As supervisors we will be prepared to help you with technical questions as well as more general questions that you may have prepared. For the group meetings we can discuss general background knowledge, and we can also discuss ad hoc exercises if that is relevant. For the individual meetings you are welcome to send questions or samples of text for us to read and provide feedback on before the meeting. Note that we will generally not be able to find bugs in your R code.

More information

Responsibilities and project contract

Studieordning, see Bilag 1.

Studieordning, matematik, see Bilag 3 for the formal thesis objectives.

Prerequisites

The formal prerequisites are the courses Statistical Methods and Mathematical Statistics (or equivalent), but you are also expected to be interested in the following:

Overall objective

The overall objective of the projects is to train you in working on your own with a larger data modeling problem. This includes narrowing down the statistical theory that you want to focus on and the corresponding analysis of data. It also includes that you search for relevant literature.

General advice

You are encouraged to use R Markdown (and perhaps also Tidyverse as described in R4DS) to organize data analysis, simulations and other practical computations. But you should not hand in the raw result of such a document. That document should serve as a log of your activities and help you carry out reproducible analysis. The final report should be written as an independent document. Guidance on how to write the report can be found in the following references.

GL: Guidelines to writing a thesis in statistics by Björn Andersson, Shaobo Jin and Fan Yang-Wallentin from the Department of Statistics, Uppsala University. However, note that these are recommendations to help you, they are NOT requirements, in particular: You can use any reference style, and you should not make 1.5 line spacing, but 1 line spacing.

R4DS: R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham

RMD: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide by Yihui Xie, J. J. Allaire, Garrett Grolemund

Probably the following document can help you: Advice on writing a report. Please note that the linked document was prepared specifically for the 7.5 ECTS project course “Project in Statistics”, and it has a focus on writing an applied project. The advice on using the IMRaD structure does not apply directly to the bachelor’s thesis that you are writing, which, in particular, should contain a theory section/chapter. But most of the general advice apply.

Projects

Understanding the movements of Greenland sharks in the Arctic

This project is about analysing data from 3 Greenland sharks in Baffin Bay and around Greenland.

SharkSharkShark