Scientists, engineers and the like are a strange lot. Unperturbed by societal norms, they direct their energies to finding better alternatives to existing theories and concocting solutions to unsolved problems. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, they record their observations and crunch the numbers. This tome is about the science of crunching. It’s about digging out something of value from the detritus that others tend to leave behind. The described approaches involve constructing models to process the available data. Smoothing entails revisiting historical records in an endeavour to understand something of the past. Filtering refers to estimating what is happening currently, whereas prediction is concerned with hazarding a guess.
