"This book presents a self-contained introduction to stochastic processes with emphasis on their applications in science, engineering, finance, computer science, and operations research. It provides theoretical foundations for modeling time-dependent random phenomena in these areas and illustrates their application by analyzing numerous practical examples." "Mastering the contents of this book prepares readers to apply stochastic modeling in their own fields and enables them to work more creatively with software designed for dealing with the data analysis aspects of stochastic processes."--Jacket.