"Over the past 20 years, there has been an incredible change in the size, structure, and types of data collected in the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, social and behavioral researchers have increasingly been asking the question: "What do I do with all of this data?" The goal of this book is to help answer that question. It is our viewpoint that in social and behavioral research, to answer the question "What do I do with all of this data?", one needs to know the latest advances in the algorithms and think deeply about the interplay of statistical algorithms, data, and theory. An important distinction between this book and most other books in the area of machine learning is our focus on theory"--
