Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms [Hardcover]

Pierre Baldi (Author), Paolo Frasconi (Author), Padhraic Smyth (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470849061 | ISBN-13: 978-0470849064 | Publication Date: May 28, 2003 | Edition: 1

Modeling the Internet and the Web covers the most important aspects of modeling the Web using a modern mathematical and probabilistic treatment. It focuses on the information and application layers, as well as some of the emerging properties of the Internet.

 Provides a comprehensive introduction to the modeling of the Internet and the Web at the information level.
 Takes a modern approach based on mathematical, probabilistic, and graphical modeling.
 Provides an integrated presentation of theory, examples, exercises and applications.
 Covers key topics such as text analysis, link analysis, crawling techniques, human behaviour, and commerce on the Web.

Interdisciplinary in nature, Modeling the Internet and the Web will be of interest to students and researchers from a variety of disciplines including computer science, machine learning, engineering, statistics, economics, business, and the social sciences.

"This book is fascinating!" - David Hand (Imperial College, UK)

"This book provides an extremely useful introduction to the intellectually stimulating problems of data mining electronic business." - Andreas S. Weigend (Chief Scientist, Amazon.com)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"…I congratulate the authors on a very well-researched and well-written publication." (Technometrics, August 2004, Vol. 46, No. 3)

“…fascinating …I highly recommend this book…” (Short Book Reviews, August 2004)

“…a very well-researched and well-written publication.” (Technometrics, August 2004) 

From the Back Cover

The World Wide Web is growing in size at a remarkable rate.  It is a huge evolving system and its data are rife with uncertainties.  Probability and statistics are the fundamental mathematical tools that enable us to model, reason and infer meaningful results from such data.  Modelling the Internet and the Web covers the most important aspects of modeling the Web using a modern mathematical and probabilistic treatment.  It focuses on the information and application layers, as well as some of the merging properties of the Internet.

• Provides a comprehensive introduction to the modeling of the Internet and Web at the information  level.
• Takes a modern approach based on mathematical, probabilistic and graphical modeling.
• Provides an integrated presentation of theory, examples, exercies and applications.
• Covers key topics such as text analysis, link analysis, crawling techniques, human behaviour, and commerce on the Web.

Interdisciplinary in nature, Modeling the Internet and the Web will be of interest to students and researchers from a variety of disciplines including computer science, machine learning, engineering, statistics, economics, business and the social sciences.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 285 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (May 28, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470849061
• ISBN-13: 978-0470849064
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,656,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, July 31, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms (Hardcover)

This is the best book I have seen on the Web and the Internet. It is very thorough and covers topics ranging from Web graphs, to search engines, to customer behavior and ecommerce. It is up to date, well organized. I highly recommend it.

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A hopeless intellectual exercise, December 11, 2004

By 

Unknown Comic - See all my reviews

This review is from: Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms (Hardcover)

I gave two stars to be charitable. The authors assume an incredible amount of background knowledge on behalf of the reader, in fact the book is more a review of this assumed knowledge rather than a tutorial or exposition of the topics. Equations and symbolic logic are incorporated needlessly to explain many simple concepts, but when applied to complex topics, these same rigorous techniques are given no supporting explanation. If you can follow the non-explanations the authors provide, you likely have already mastered this subject area and don't need to read this book at all. If you are new to the field, you will be stumped by the shallow coverage of complex theory, and this is even for people with graduate level computer science or mathematics. These authors need a better editor, someone who actually cares if the reader has any idea what is going on.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book about relevant topic, July 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms (Hardcover)

The internet and the web have become a wonderful field for applying mathematical methods to huge amounts of uncontrolled information. The ultimate contribution of this book, I think, is to present techniques by which results that are meaningful and useful for people -- such as text analysis and categorization, or relevance of web pages, or recommendation systems -- can emerge from the application of cold mathematical formulas. The mathematical tools are not necessarily new and may be hard to follow by non-experts (this is mostly Machine Learning, probability, etc). To fully appreciate the book, one needs to grasp the math, but I think the text is sufficiently interesting so that the book can also be enjoyed by people who don't like to read the math. The book is fairly comprehensive about modeling important processes that happen everyday on the web.