Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is probably ideal as a reference source for a graduate student or professor who knows stochastics very well already.
However, if you are a novice trying to learn about stochastics and want good explanations and examples with an appropriate buildup, I would not recommend the book.
As an example, the review discussion of probability in the first four chapters didn't even come close to comparing with the probability book I used in another class. If you are near a bookstore, you can easily verify this. I imagine that this comparison (or lack thereof) would hold for many other probability textbooks. Also, if presentation makes a difference to you, this is quite minimalist.
Another area that I found lacking is that the answers in the back just provide a numerical answer without any explanation to how solutions were arrived at. While this is often the case for other books, the author did not provide a sufficient base for a novice to work the problems. As a result, most of the end of chapter problems were of little use in helping me better learn the materials. A good workbook or better explanations would be very helpful.
While there are certainly couple areas that I found worthwhile and this does appear to be one of the only books on this niche area (the lack of competition may explain a lot of why the shortcomings exist and why this doesn't have the feel of real textbook), this first edition book needs some serious work to make it truly effective and user friendly.
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Modeling, Analysis, Design, and Control of Stochastic Systems (Springer Texts in Statistics)An introductory level text on stochastic modelling, suited for undergraduates or graduates in actuarial science, business management, computer science, engineering, operations research, public policy, statistics, and mathematics. It employs a large number of examples to show how to build stochastic models of physical systems, analyse these models to predict their performance, and use the analysis to design and control them. The book provides a self-contained review of the relevant topics in probability theory: In discrete and continuous time Markov models it covers the transient and long term behaviour, cost models, and first passage times; under generalised Markov models, it covers renewal processes, cumulative processes and semi-Markov processes. All the material is illustrated with many examples, and the book emphasises numerical answers to the problems. A software package called MAXIM, which runs on MATLAB, is available for downloading.
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