Preface
The increasing number of people contributing to the Internet, either deliberately or incidentally, has created a huge set of data that gives us millions of potential insights into user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general. This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of collective intelligence. It covers ways to get hold of interesting datasets from many web sites you’ve probably heard of, ideas on how to collect data from users of your own applications, and many different ways to analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it.
This book’s goal is to take you beyond simple database-backed applications and teach you how to write smarter programs to take advantage of the information you and others collect every day.
Prerequisites
The code examples in this book are written in Python, and familiarity with Python programming will help, but I provide explanations of all the algorithms so that programmers of other languages can follow. The Python code will be particularly easy to follow for those who know high-level languages like Ruby or Perl. This book is not intended as a guide for learning programming, so it’s important that you’ve done enough coding to be familiar with the basic concepts. If you have a good understanding of recursion and some basic functional programming, you’ll find the material even easier.
This book does not assume you have any prior knowledge of data analysis, machine learning, or statistics. I’ve tried to ...