Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.

Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains:

• Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media
• Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset
• Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm
• Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one
• Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features
• Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made
• Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models
• Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites
• Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset
• Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game

Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you.

"Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details."
-- Dan Russell, Google

"Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths."
-- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

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Amust read for webstie development,  November 08 2007
Submitted by Doug Wake   [Respond | View]


What an awesome book. Collective Intelligence shows you how to utilize mathematical search algorithms in a way for analyzing websites. In school I learned calcIII and calcV which was series and matrices respectively to analyze numbers. Well in this book you begin by understanding how to search for a character or string of data with a very well laid out plan. You even get to use real time data when developing your project in Python.

Then the improvement, when using some algorithms, Euclidian distance, Pearson coefficient, Entropy, Conditional Probability, you begin to utilize numbers by giving your websites a weight for how you search. Toby Segaran is excellent in explanation of building a smart web application to keep track where you go. It also teaches you to find out who has visited your site as well as the probability that your site will be chosen next.

Also with utilizing these search algorithms is good way to show the history of data to gain marketing for advertisements. Utilizing AI in the back ground is always great find but can be difficult to teach, but this book was laid out very well in getting to the point for a programmer to learn high rate math algorithms.


What a nice read,
Doug Wake



Great book for smart web apps,  November 06 2007
Submitted by W. Blanchard   [Respond | View]

I just read Collective Intelligence. I found it very useful in understanding the different methods used to collect data. This evolved from using algorithms suited for a certain problem to creating your own algorithms with machine-learning techniques. The many different algorithms and python script examples were helpful.


A great book for any web developer or AI geek.,  October 29 2007
Submitted by Noah Gift   [Respond | View]

I was quite excited to get a copy of Collective Intelligence to review for the PyAtl Bookclub, as I am extremely interested in Artificial Intelligence. I was also extremely pleased to learn that Collective Intelligence used Python, exclusively, throughout the book to explain the author's ideas. There is a certain like minding thinking that Python Programmers share and it certainly comes through in this book by Toby Segaran.

With these high expectations on the table, it would have been easy for me to be disappointed, but the book met the expectations that I had, and in certain situations, exceeded them. One of the great aspects of Python, is that is so pragmatic. In a trivial amount of code, this book explained how to apply unsupervised learning techniques to RSS feeds. I had been meaning for quite some time to write some code that parsed RSS feeds and determined relevant information for me automatically. In Chapter 2, the book jumps right into using the "feedparser" module, to do just that! There are also great examples of using, "urllib2", and SQLite, in that same chapter.

Throughout, the rest of the book, Toby explores various other AI techniques, and explains clearly, how to implement them in Python. One nice touch at the end of the book, was to include a reference to modules used in the book, and to include small usage examples. I was quite pleased by Collective Intelligence, and I would recommend the book to any intermediate to advanced programmer who wants to learn more about AI, and also web specific applications of AI theory.

PyAtl Bookclub Review (http://pyatl.blogspot.com/2007/10/review-of-collective-intelligence.html)


Best book from this year...,  September 22 2007
Submitted by Alexandre Dulaunoy   [Respond | View]

This book is surely the book of the year published by O'Reilly. The organization of the book is well done, the Python code example are concise and clear, the mathematical explanation are clever and simple...

Sometimes when reading a book, the quality between chapters changes but here all chapter meet a very high level of quality. A must to have on your bookshelf if you deal with a lot of user-contributed data from web services.




The most accessible book on machine learning I've found,  September 11 2007
Submitted by Thomas Lockney   [Respond | View]

I first learned of this book just a few weeks ago, shortly before it was available. I immediately read the sample chapter on the publisher's website and was certain I had to get a hold of a copy.

I was not in the least bit disappointed with what I found. It has been quite a while since I've looked at any Python code (I'm more of a Ruby fan, personally), but the code is easy to follow and it's a simple matter to extract the basic concepts into any language.

I have spent quite a few years now watching the field of machine intelligence from the sidelines, occasionally reading the odd technical write up or wikipedia article, trying to wrap my brain around the basic ideas. The thing is, it's not clear to me that in some regards, it's not that complex. It's just that most of the existing books and articles are written for those immersed in the field. This book is not like that. It explains things in clear language that is easy to follow, using simplified examples and making excellent use of graphics to "show" you how it works.

If you really want to dig in deep, Segaran provides exercises at the end of each chapter and gives you an appendix full of mathematical formulas (the "pure" representation of the algorithms).

Finally, I should mention that the last chapter does what so many other technical books should but don't: it clearly summarizes everything he has shown you. He does this in a straightforward way so that you won't have to go searching through the book, rereading everything again, to put these techniques into practice.

(note: I originally published this review on Amazon, but this book deserves that I print it here, too.)

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