Two books on Collective Intelligence
I needed an introduction to the topic of collective intelligence.
My hope was to find some books offering a clear overview of the main algorithms and a good amount of examples, using data collected throught the various public APIs available.
The two books I’ve read are Algorithms of the Intelligent Web (published by Manning) and Programming Collective Intelligence (by O’Reilly). The first one uses Java, the second one Python.
Both the books are worth reading. They cover the main areas of collective intelligence (making recommendations, data clustering, searching, filtering, classification, optimization).
Programming Collective intelligence covers some advanced techniques (like Support-Vector Machines and Genetic Programming), though Algorithms of Intelligent Web has a deeper coverage of some algorithms, such as PageRank.
Both the books offer lots of examples that use public APIs to show interesting applications (like spam filtering, recommendation systems, click-tracking networks, financial analysis).
My ratings are 4 and 5 stars out of five, respectively.