Web and Network Data Science: Modeling Techniques in Predictive Analytics

1. Being Technically Inclined

“Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?”

—MAE WEST AS LADY LOU IN She Done Him Wrong (1933)

I began my business career working as a network engineer in Roseville, Minnesota. Just out of graduate training in statistics at the University of Minnesota, I was well schooled in math and models but lacking business understanding. It did not take long to learn that success in my job meant coming up with meaningful answers for management.

In the dial-up and leased-line world of the late 1970s, asynchronous, bisynchronous, and synchronous connections ruled the day. We translated network protocols into polling and message bits and noted the bits per second that each communication line could accommodate. Queuing theory and ...