Sutton and Barto's book on reinforcement learning is available online at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html, and is probably the definitive work on the subject.
Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
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Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#12Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.
The "Programming Collective Intelligence" book is pretty good in terms of a practical introduction to a variety of techniques.
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#13Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.
I disagree wrt Mitchell; too dry and out-of-date. In its place I'd recommend the Norvig book which covers everything Mitchell does (IIRC) except 'Probably Approximately Correct' (PAC) learning. And, it's more up-to-date (Support Vector Machines) and is much more readable. Also, I haven't read it except a flip-through at a bookstore, but Christopher Bishop's one I'd look at (perhaps the Amazon comments).
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#14Sutton and Barto's book on reinforcement learning is available online at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html , and is probably the definitive work on the subject.
I wish they'd make a new edition; but, probably, the field is moving too fast.
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#15Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.
I disagree wrt Mitchell; too dry and out-of-date. In its place I'd recommend the Norvig book which covers everything Mitchell does (IIRC) except 'Probably Approximately Correct' (PAC) learning. And, it's more up-to-date (Support Vector Machines) and is much more readable. Also, I haven't read it except a flip-through at a bookstore, but Christopher Bishop's one I'd look at (perhaps the Amazon comments).
I've seen the Norvig book recommended by others on this site for ML, but I don't understand why: the Norvig book is an AI book, not an ML book. It only has a few chapters on learning, and IIRC much of that is on reinforcement learning. Obviously the Norvig book is very well-written and is good background for learning about ML, but I don't think it is a sufficient ML book as such.
As far as ML goes, I found the "Programming Collective Intelligence" book to very readable and practical, but very light on the theoretical foundations (which is intentional, of course). I've got a copy of the Witten ML book ("Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques"), but to be honest I haven't gotten much from it yet, either: it doesn't seem to discuss SVMs in any detail, nor random forests or neural networks. But I haven't really dug into it yet.
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#16Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.
I disagree wrt Mitchell; too dry and out-of-date. In its place I'd recommend the Norvig book which covers everything Mitchell does (IIRC) except 'Probably Approximately Correct' (PAC) learning. And, it's more up-to-date (Support Vector Machines) and is much more readable. Also, I haven't read it except a flip-through at a bookstore, but Christopher Bishop's one I'd look at (perhaps the Amazon comments).
If you can read and understand Mitchell's book, you will have a very good foundation for understanding modern ML techniques. The poster was looking for references to introduce him to the field.
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#17Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay is excellent, and freely available online. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
I'll second this recommendation - I bought the printed copy, and I'm constantly going to it for reference. The fact that it's available for free is just an added bonus.
I would also suggest Elements of Statistical Learning: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/
As well as Duda, Hart, and Stork's Pattern Classification: http://rii.ricoh.com/~stork/DHS.html
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#18If you want a fairly easy read without too many equations, try: Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition) http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html Which goes nicely with the Weka open source ML toolkit http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/ (although it is a good read without the toolkit) If you want a bit more math, I really like the recent (Oct 2007) book: Pattern Recognition…
I didn't particularly like the WEKA book, but Bishop's book is excellent.
If you're interested in introductory data mining stuff, I would recommend Tan's Introduction to Data Mining: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kumar/dmbook/index.php
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree wrt Mitchell; too dry and out-of-date. In its place I'd recommend the Norvig book which covers everything Mitchell does (IIRC) except 'Probably Approximately Correct' (PAC) learning. And, it's more up-to-date (Support Vector Machines) and is much more readable. Also, I haven't read it except a flip-through at a bookstore, but Christopher Bishop's one I'd look at (perhaps the Amazon comments).
I've seen the Norvig book recommended by others on this site for ML, but I don't understand why: the Norvig book is an AI book, not an ML book. It only has a few chapters on learning, and IIRC much of that is on reinforcement learning. Obviously the Norvig book is very well-written and is good background for learning about ML, but I don't think it is a sufficient ML book as such. As far as ML goes, I found the "Progr…
This is kind of moot, truthfully I'd go, now (or look first at, but they're both getting praise so...) for Chris Bishop or Ethem Alpaydin's new books. But between Norvig and Mitchell, Norvig has 138 pages on learning vs Mitchell's ~390, but, Mitchell's is from a different era, Norvig is easier to read - larger pages, more diagrams, better writing, and you know where you are better - and fresher material. To each his own. But like I say, I'd probably go with one of the even newer ones. For a while Mitchell was all there was, then Norvig came along, and now there're a few to choose from.
Re: Can anyone recommend good books, articles or essays that introduce machine learning?
#20Check out the lecture notes for CS229, Stanford's class on Machine Learning. The class has no textbook, so the notes are fairly comprehensive. (Though the math notation can get a bit intense...)