Handbook

This course is a continuation of our introductory algorithms courses COMP3121/3821/9101/9801. We will cover some of the basic randomised algorithms and data structures, such as randomised hashing, skip-lists, order statistics and Karger's randomised Min Cut algorithm. We will then look at the Markov chains and the Google PageRank algorithm, the Hidden Markov Models and the Viterbi Algorithm, and then cover in quite a detail a variety of other algorithms important to the present day practice, such as the recommender systems as well as some of the algorithms used in Data Science. We will cover parts of three books: our COMP3121/3821/9101/9801 textbook Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardosh, Networked Life by Mung Chiang and Foundations of Data Science by Blum, Hopcroft and Kannan. The first two books are available in the bookstore. A preprint of the third book is available for free at https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book.pdf.