Acknowledgments

This is by far the easiest part of the book to write...

First, I would like to thank the folks at Manning. Above all, I would like to thank my editor Troy Mott; if not for his support and enthusiasm, this book never would have happened. I would also like to thank Maureen Spencer who helped polish my prose in the final manuscript; she was a pleasure to work with.

Next I would like to thank Jennie Si at Arizona State University for letting me sneak into her class on discrete-time stochastic systems without registering. Also Cynthia Rudin at MIT for pointing me to the paper “Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining,”^[1] which inspired the approach I took in this book. For indirect contributions I would like to thank Mark Bauer, Jerry Barkely, Jose Zero, Doug Chang, Wayne Carter, and Tyler Neylon.

¹ Xindong Wu, et al., “Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining,” Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems 14, no. 1 (December 2007).

Special thanks to the following peer reviewers who read the manuscript at different stages during its development and provided invaluable feedback: Keith Kim, Franco Lombardo, Patrick Toohey, Josef Lauri, Ryan Riley, Peter Venable, Patrick Goetz, Jeroen Benckhuijsen, Ian McAllister, Orhan Alkan, Joseph Ottinger, Fred Law, Karsten Strøbæk, Brian Lau, Stephen McKamey, Michael Brennan, Kevin Jackson, John Griffin, Sumit Pal, Alex Alves, Justin Tyler Wiley, and John Stevenson.