Interim Report Guidelines
Submission of an Interim report for the Capstone Project is mandatory. Interim reports are
evaluated by the Program Director/ Evaluator and are provided with necessary
recommendations for revision.
To have effective comments from the reviewer and to avoid unpleasant surprises during
final presentations, it is strongly recommended that project teams share preliminary
results in their interim reports.
Objective of evaluation of the Interim Report is to check
 That team has understood the business problem
 That the project is on track
 That analytical reasoning and technology applied are appropriate
 That interim results are aligned to business expectation
It is expected that teams have completed fair amount of work (50% or more) by the time
Interim Reports are submitted.
Reports containing inadequate amount of work will score low.
Contents of Interim Report
An Interim Report may be of 15 – 20 pages (excluding the cover page and appendices). Interim
Report is a stand-alone document which must contain the need of the study, objective and
scope of the project and anything else that is required to clearly understand the progression of
the project to date.
Standard Instructions:
 All pages must be numbered.
 Tables/figures/charts/graphics (if any) must have number and title.
 Groups must make sure visualizations are clearly read at usual magnification and
add value to the Report
 All visualizations must be clearly labeled.
 All axis labels and legends must be legible.
 Tableau graphics default mode is not always conducive to normal copypaste. Proper adjustment may be required.
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All raw codes and raw outputs must be in Appendix. Illegible graphs and raw codes and
raw outputs in the body of the report will mandate heavy penalty.
A good Interim Report contains information on

Introduction – Give relevant details about the project, industry, company, and a need
of the present study

Scope & Objectives - Define the core problem statement and list down the objectives
of the project. Ideally here you will state the overall objective and break it down into
the steps that you are going to follow to achieve the objective. Scope defines the
boundary of the project. Clearly mention what is within scope and outside scope of the
project. Establish the fact that you have understood business / social opportunity, state
how the study / project helps the stakeholders.

Processing of the data – All details about the data must be provided. Brief indications
for data challenges and data processing details, including information about all data
attributes including any special characteristics, report on missing data, nature of
attributes (variable info, renaming if required), report on invalid values and outliers,
treatment of missing, invalid / outliers, identification and removing unwanted
variables, variable transformations etc. with your comments must be mentioned.

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) – EDA is done with the objective of
understanding the data better by using insightful visualizations so that logical steps to
model building follows. Tables/figures based on EDA should draw out relationships
among the variables. Clearly mention what insight you derive from them. Note that
the insights from EDA must be used for model building.

Modeling Technique – Interim reports are not expected to include final results but
for effective feedback you must provide interim results. For example, if you are working
to predict a binary response variable, it is not enough to state that you will be using
logistic regression and CART. You need to write the basis for your model selection,
prove that the model assumptions are satisfied, show the model parameters & goodness
of fit for the model, choice of appropriate model performance measures, compare the
model performance measures for both training data & test data to prove that your model
does not overfit. You should include logistic regression model output (including
McFadden R Square, significant independent variables at the specified level of
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significance (for example, 5%), estimates of coefficients, Odd’s ratio / probability with
interpretation); CART output (model parameters, pruned tree, variable importance plot
with your interpretation).

It is strongly encouraged that you try to garner insights into the problem and mention
next steps, keeping the final recommendations into view.

Recommendations & Applications - Students should clearly mention the expected
outcome of the project and what are the possible applications of them.
 References and Bibliography - Details about any reference books, articles, web
resources etc. that are to be used for the project.
A good Interim Report should be comprehensive, readable, informative and will adhere to
all the above recommendations to score high on evaluation. Non-adherence to the
Guidelines will lead to penalty.
For more recommendations on how to write a professional report, consult Guidelines on
Capstone Report & Presentation
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