Book excerpt: Suitable for a one-semester course, this text teaches students how to use stochastic processes efficiently. Carefully balancing mathematical rigor and ease of exposition, the book provides students with a sufficient understanding of the theory and a practical appreciation of how it is used in real-life situations. Special emphasis is on the interpretation of various statistical models and concepts as well as the types of questions statistical analysis can answer. To enable hands-on practice, MATLAB code is available online.