Preface
Machine Learning for Hackers: Email
How This Book is Organized
Conventions Used in This Book
Using Code Examples
How to Contact Us
Using R
R for Machine Learning
Further Reading on R
Data Exploration
Exploration vs. Confirmation
What is Data?
Inferring the Types of Columns in Your Data
Inferring Meaning
Numeric Summaries
Means, Medians, and Modes
Quantiles
Standard Deviations and Variances
Exploratory Data Visualization
Visualizing the Relationships between Columns
Classification: Spam Filtering
This or That: Binary Classification
Moving Gently into Conditional Probability
Writing Our First Bayesian Spam Classifier
Ranking: Priority Inbox
How Do You Sort Something When You Don’t Know the Order?
Ordering Email Messages by Priority
Writing a Priority Inbox
Works Cited
Books
Articles
About the Authors
That looks like TOC for "Machine Learning for Email", which is just a portion of the entire "Machine Learning for Hackers" book. The full "Machine Learning for Hackers" doesn't appear to be on Safari yet.
It doesn't look as advanced as Collective Intelligence (the Python-based book which covers most of Ng's ML course), but it looks like a cool R introduction.
using R seems a bit strange to me -- i have nothing against R (use it regularly), but not exactly a "hacker" language. this seems like an ideal book for python, but R?
I had the same feeling when I saw this. R is a great tool for statistics, very useful when you need to do in-depth statistical analysis (analysis of variance, etc.). It doesn't strike me as a good choice for a hacker's book - which makes me think about their reasons to use this word, hacker. Maybe they are just trying to benefit from the buzz that it generates these days?
Why are hackers allowed to use Python but not R? R is a quite powerful Scheme-like language with an incredible math library. Python is a "teaching language", officially.
unfortunately I see here, that there seems to be a large part of the book spent on a statistics introduction (including R) and only one machine learning algorithm actually gets introduced. and on top of all it's one of the most simple ones (naive bayes). I expected at least some further description of support vector machines or other advanced techniques.
