Programming Collective Intelligence

A cool book ER pointed out!

Programming Collective Intelligence
When Time Magazine picked "You" as their Person of the Year for 2006, they cemented the idea that Web 2.0 is about "user generated content" -- and that Wikipedia, YouTube, and
MySpace are the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution. The true story is so much more complex than that. The content that users contribute explicitly to Web 2.0 sites is the small fraction
that is visible above the surface. 80% of what matters is below, in the dark matter of implicitly-contributed data. More

The book covers:

• 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