Book Review: Ensemble Methods: Foundations and Algorithms

Erving Goffman, one of the most influential sociologists of the last century published the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (PSEL;1959). This is the most definitive 20th century study of the patterns of human behavior in mundane social situations. If we look to psychology, sociology, anthropology, marketing or even organisational studies the representation of human behavior emerges from rich PSEL type “thick” qualitative descriptions. This approach is prevalent amongst the social sciences and does not provide a pathway to generalizable or predictive models of behavior. Furthermore, the availability of big data from social networks is pushing researchers and practitioners to undertake deep and dynamic behavioral analysis in the converging online and offline worlds.