Acknowledgments
Several data repositories on the web were helpful, either because of the data sets available there or merely as a source of inspiration. Among the most helpful were
- The data set collection and the Data and Story Library (DASL) at StatLib (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu)
- The UCI Machine Learning Repository at UC Irvine (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLRepository.html)
- R. J. Hyndman’s Time Series Data Library (http://www-personal.buseco.monash.edu.au/~hyndman/TSDL)
- The Exploring Data site at Central Queensland University (http://exploringdata.cqu.edu.au)
Wherever specific data sets have been used, detailed attribution is given in the text.
Two resources I relied on more than on any other: the excellent collection of the University of Washington libraries (Seattle), and the amazingly comprehensive store of information available at Wikipedia.
Writing a book is a long process, much more involved than writing a collection of independent papers of equal length. One of the lessons I learned during the preparation of this book is this: even if you know that writing a book will take longer than you expect, it still takes longer than you expect!
Handling projects of such nature takes true dedication and courage. I would like to express special appreciation to Marjan Bace and his team at Manning publications for taking this project on and guiding it to completion.