I was just wondering how the reports we produce should compare to an academic paper?
Good question.
At maximum 4 pages (including figures and references), the reports will be quite a bit shorter than (most) academic papers, especially given the lack of any Supplementary Information or similar. Because of this, it won’t be possible to go into the same level of detail you would in an academic paper – you’ll need to be sparing with both words and citations.
The report also needs to be written for experts with diverse backgrounds, which means less emphasis on technical detail and more on a high-level explanation of what your model can do and why it’s useful (though you can and should include technical details where they’re key to understanding the value of your approach). More on this later.
Aside from length and number of figures, there aren’t any ironclad formatting rules you need to follow in the report. That said, thinking of the report as a short academic paper provides some good guidelines: key external contributions should be cited, figures should have captions, et cetera. Devoting some of your first page to an abstract/summary would also be a very good idea.
Should we assume no subject knowledge at all in machine learning?
The judges reviewing a given submission will vary quite a bit in their ML knowledge; some will be subject-matter experts, others will have a cursory understanding, and others will have very little ML or statistics background.
This being the case, you’ll need to make sure your report is interesting/comprehensible to people both with and without an ML background. While you should make clear what techniques you used (and cite references for the most important), you don’t need to spend large amounts of space explaining the technical detail of how your techniques work. The most important thing is that you make it clear why you selected the techniques you did, and how they contribute to solving attribution problems that a non-ML expert might care about.
And are there any examples you can point us to of the style of report you are expecting?
Good question. I will get back to you about this one.