Going from a research idea to experiments is fundamental. But this
step is typically glossed over with little explicit advice. In
academia, the graduate student is often left toiling away—fragmented
code, various notes and LaTeX write-ups scattered around.
New projects often result in entirely new code bases, and if they do
rely on past code, are difficult to properly extend to these new projects.Motivated by this, I thought it’d be useful to outline the steps I
personally take in going from research idea to experimentation, and
how that then improves my research understanding so I can revise the
idea. This process is crucial: given an initial idea, all my time is
spent on this process;
and for me at least, the experiments are key to
learning about and solving problems that I couldn’t predict otherwise.1
Finding the Right Problem
Before working on a project, it’s necessary to decide how
ideas might jumpstart into something more official. Sometimes it’s as
simple as having a mentor suggest a project to work on; or tackling a
specific data set or applied problem; or having a conversation with a
frequent collaborator and then striking up a useful problem
to work on together. More often, I find that research is
a result of a long chain of ideas which were continually
iterated upon—through frequent conversations, recent
work, longer term readings of subjects I’m unfamiliar with
(e.g., Pearl (2000)),
and
favorite papers I like to revisit (e.g.,Wainwright & Jordan (2008),Gelman & Shalizi (2012)).
链接：
http://dustintran.com/blog/a-research-to-engineering-workflow
原文链接：
http://weibo.com/1402400261/F6hoaoa7D?ref=home&rid=13_0_202_2669695269754940236&type=comment#_rnd1496574915171
