To help develop my project, I emailed scientists who had worked with the dataset I planned to use. I asked them how they had dealt with the missing data, and one scientist wrote back to me that they had used data discretization, so I added that as an option to the preprocessing step of my experimental design. I also asked them what could additionally be done with my dataset besides classification, and another scientist wrote back to me that I could perform a clustering analysis of my dataset. At the time, I was not aware of what clustering was, but I was aware that no peer-reviewed researcher had taken this step on my dataset yet, so I included it in my proposal as a tentative component of my project.