The following is one potential project outline, but you may follow any journal format you prefer. Note that while the ideal paper would include all of the following, even published papers do not include all of the following. You and your collaborators (if any) will need to decide what to include.

NOTE: Even published papers do not include all (or even most) of the following. You and your collaborators will need to decide what to include.

1. Abstract.
2. Introduction: Briefly introduce the problem, techniques, and outline the paper. Try to use as few technical terms as possible (or reference section where defined).
3. Background
• Problem description:
Fully describe the problem. Describe how the data is created, what is its format, what are issues that one should consider (for example are their different types of noise), etc. Please keep in mind that people from a variety of backgrounds may be interested in your article, so please help them understand your data. Deeper mathematics can be applied if more people have a better understanding of the problem.
• Mathematical background:
One can reference appropriate papers that describe the methods used in your paper or you can provide the background yourself. Including motivation specific to your problem would be particularly helpful.
4. Results
• Data analysis.
In either the results or discussion section, motivate your choices, both techniques and parameters. Output often depends on parameters. Motivate your parameter choices. Are these choices robust (for example, does one get similar results for different choices of parameter values).
5. Discussion
• What do your results mean?
• Compare your results to results using other types of data analysis tools.
• Validation:
Part of validation includes motivating and determining the robustness of the choices you made when analyzing the data and comparing your results to previously published results. But another part is to determine if the results give you useful information for your particular problem. For example, a cluster found in Topology based data analysis identifies a subgroup of breast cancers with a unique mutational profile and excellent survival by Nicolau, Levine, and Carlsson was validated by further examining the biological properties of this cluster. Of course, this requires laboratory experiments which your collaborators may or may not be able to perform.
6. Conclusion
7. Acknowledgement
You should acknowledge anyone who has provided significant feedback. If you publish the results of your project, please acknowledge this course. If I provide you with significant helpful feedback, you are also welcome to acknowledge me.
8. Author contribution
Summarize who contributed what to the paper (who designed, computed, analyzed, wrote, etc.).
9. Funding sources and conflicts of interest
10. References
This is a very important part of your paper. It lets the reader know where to find additional information. One is also required to reference other people's ideas, analysis, conclusions, figures, etc (even if modified, reworded, or redrawn). Using other people's work without acknowledgment constitutes plagerism. For figures, one may also need to obtain copyright permission if you submit your paper for publication, and redrawing a figure may be discouraged.