
Research Blog: Machine Learning Book for Students and Researchers - Anon84
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/machine-learning-book-for-students-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FgJZg+%28Official+Google+Research+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
======
imurray
Aside: I find it ridiculous that I can't read a blog post, a little bit of
text and an image, without enabling javascript on two domains. I know that a
bunch of you will think only masochists use NoScript, but the page is slow to
appear and needlessly complicated. If there's anyone at Google who could help
your company set a better example, please nudge the right people.

~~~
pasbesoin
And this one is not in Google's cache. I've taken to reading the cached
version of many blogspot pages, for this reason -- I have a browser extension
that makes that just a couple of clicks to accomplish. Maybe Google has caught
on to this.

EDIT: My mistake; I just had to strip off the bazillion query parameters.

Google cache of the post:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleresearch.blogspot.com%2F2012%2F08%2Fmachine-
learning-book-for-students-and.html)

------
iskander
I haven't seen this book before but I did take Prof. Mohri's class a few years
ago. His material is great but be warned that is's biased heavily towards
theory (proofs and bounds instead of the more common/practical "rules of
thumb"). You can get a lot done using machine learning tools having only a
superficial familiarity with VC dimension, complexity bounds, etc... If
however, you want to get deeper insight into the algorithms you're using or
develop new algorithms yourself then Prof Mohri's of rigor is very useful.

~~~
achompas
I took Prof. Mohri's class this spring, and we actually used a draft version
of this book. I agree with you that it's very theoretical, but Bishop,
Mitchell, and the other ML resources don't address learning theory. VC-
dimension isn't for everyone, but if you need to know about it, this is the
book you want to use.

There's also the added bonus of this text coming from Prof. Mohri et al.'s
experiences at Google, so there's a lot of discussion about online algorithms
and ranking (which you don't see in many other places).

------
dude_abides
My favorite introductory textbook on machine learning is the Tom Mitchell
book: [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M-
Mitchell/dp/007...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M-
Mitchell/dp/0070428077)

The Bishop book is the most popular though:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387310738/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387310738/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/102-4351241-7974535?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155)

~~~
exg
The Elements of Statistical Learning, by T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani and J.
Friedman [1] is also a very good one. Plus, the book is freely available on
the authors' website.

[1] <http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/>

------
cmansley
Does anyone know if the table of contents is somewhere online?

~~~
andyjohnson0
One of the authors (Mohri) teaches a course called Foundation of Machine
learning. Details are here[1] and may give an indication of the books'
contents.

[1] <http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/ml10/>

~~~
achompas
Use this link instead:

<http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/ml12/>

It's the last class he taught before the book was published. I was in the
class, and can confirm the lecture outline closely matches the book's
contents.

------
JoelMcCracken
Why is this news?

~~~
larrydag
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-
im...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-
the-world.html?pagewanted=all)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/how-big-data-
beca...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/how-big-data-became-so-
big-unboxed.html)

~~~
JoelMcCracken
So this machine learning textbook is applied specifically to big data, in a
way that is novel and new?

------
pbharrin
When will this be on MegaUpload?

