Customer Reviews

Applied Wavelet Analysis with S-PLUS

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A nice treatment of data analysis using wavelets. Very nonmathematical and intended to be used while seated at the computer. I was a little disappointed to see that it was so tightly bound to the authors' commercial S+Wavelets software, which seems to render it pretty much useless if you or your institution doesn't have S-plus and S+Wavelets. (R implementation, anyone?)

Prerequisites: Knowledge of calculus and some knowledge of linear algebra.

This is a rather informal book on wavelet analysis. It is fairly comprehensive despite its length, covering quite a few types of wavelet analyses, transforms, and algorithms. It is also explained fairly clearly but the theory is not given enough emphasis. As the other reviewer stated, this book unfortunately relies on a commercial S-PLUS package. In addition to the fact that it requires commercial software, the functions which are used are very high level, so the details that the reader should be made aware of are hidden and if you were to implement the theory in a non-commercial software package, you would pretty much have to start from scratch. Also, they sometimes let the code get in the way of the theory, that is they often spend more time discussing the package and its applications than on the concepts that you would need to know if you didn't have this high-level software available. The book does a fairly good job early on in terms of mathematics and technical details, but it begins skimping on these things far to much later in the book telling the reader to "use this function" instead of giving the reader plenty of information that will be useful to them if they don't have this package handy. Also, though the book includes plenty of applications, it does not give you enough information to determine when each of these analyses would be useful in other real world applications. So the applications are not made to seem truly tied into the concepts, even if the analyses applied to them are fitting. It's more like "this works for this example" instead of "this works for this CLASS of problems". They do take the latter approach sometimes, but not a whole lot.

The writing style may be clear, but the sum of its flaws makes this book essentially useless.