for the last month or so i've had my head down and have been focusing more on theory (ie reading) than on practice (ie coding)
so rather than write no blog post here's mats-list-of-cool-machine-learning-books in the order i think you should consider reading them...
1) "programming collective intelligence" by toby segaran
2) "data mining" by witten and frank
this book covers quite a bit more than programming c.i. while still being extremely practical (ie very few formula). about a fifth of the book is dedicated to weka, a machine learning workbench which was written by the authors. apart from the weka section this book has no code. i made a little screencast on weka awhile back if you're after a summary. |
3) "introduction to data mining" by tan, steinbach and kumar
intermission
at this point you've probably got enough mental firepower to handle some of the uni level machine learning course notes that are floating about online.
if you're keen to get a better foundation of the maths side of things it'd be worth working through andrew ng's lecture series on machine learning. (20 hours of a second year stanford course on machine learning)
i also found andrew moore's lecture slides really great. (they do though require a reasonable understanding of the basics)
4) "foundations of statistical natural language processing" by manning and schutze
5) "introduction to machine learning" by ethem alpaydin
6) "all of statistics" by larry wasserman
7) "the elements of statistical learning" by hastie, tibshirani and friedman.
with a bit more stats under your belt you might have a chance of getting through this one; the most complex of the lot.
this book is absolutely beautifully presented and now that it's FREE to download you've got no reason not to have a crack at it. a remarkable piece of work and one i've yet to get through fully cover to cover, it's quite hardcore and right on the border of my level of understanding ( which makes it perfect for me :P ) |
ps. books i haven't read that are in the mail
"machine learning" by tom mitchell
have been wanting to read this one for awhile, i'm a big fan of tom mitchell, but couldn't justify the cost however just found out the other day the paperback is a third of the price of the hardback i was looking at!! the book's in the mail |
"pattern recognition and machine learning" by chris bishop
all of a sudden seemed like everyone was reading this but me so it was time to jump on the bandwagon |