Includes bibliographical references and index

General strategies -- A short tour of the predictive modeling process -- Data pre-processing -- Over-fitting and model tuning -- Regression models -- Measuring performance in regression models -- Linear regression and its cousins -- Nonlinear regression models -- Regression trees and rule-based models -- A summary of solubility models -- Case study : compressive strength of concrete mixtures -- classification models -- Measuring performance in classification models -- Discriminant analysis and other linear classification models -- Nonlinear classification Models -- Classification trees and rule-based models -- A summary of grant application models -- Remedies for severe class imbalance -- Case study : Job scheduling -- Other considerations -- Measuring predictor importance -- An introduction to feature selection -- Factors that can affect model performance