A thought-provoking look at statistical learning theory and its role in understanding human learning and inductive reasoning A joint endeavor from leading researchers in the fields of philosophy and electrical engineering, An Elementary Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory is a comprehensive and accessible primer on the rapidly evolving fields of statistical pattern recognition and statistical learning theory. Explaining these areas at a level and in a way that is not often found in other books on the topic, the authors present the basic theory behind contemporary machine learning and uniquely utilize its foundations as a framework for philosophical thinking about inductive inference. Promoting the fundamental goal of statistical learning, knowing what is achievable and what is not, this book demonstrates the value of a systematic methodology when used along with the needed techniques for evaluating the performance of a learning system. First, an introduction to machine learning is presented that includes brief discussions of applications such as image recognition, speech recognition, medical diagnostics, and statistical arbitrage. To enhance accessibility, two chapters on relevant aspects of probability theory are provided. Subsequent chapters feature coverage of topics such as the pattern recognition problem, optimal Bayes decision rule, the nearest neighbor rule, kernel rules, neural networks, support vector machines, and boosting. Appendices throughout the book explore the relationship between the discussed material and related topics from mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and statistics, drawing insightful connections between problems in these areas and statistical learning theory. All chapters conclude with a summary section, a set of practice questions, and a reference sections that supplies historical notes and additional resources for further study. An Elementary Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory is an excellent book for courses on statistical learning theory, pattern recognition, and machine learning at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It also serves as an introductory reference for researchers and practitioners in the fields of engineering, computer science, philosophy, and cognitive science that would like to further their knowledge of the topic.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance, marketing, and astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree-based methods, support vector machines, clustering, deep learning, survival analysis, multiple testing, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike, who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. Four of the authors co-wrote An Introduction to Statistical Learning, With Applications in R (ISLR), which has become a mainstay of undergraduate and graduate classrooms worldwide, as well as an important reference book for data scientists. One of the keys to its success was that each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in the R scientific computing environment. However, in recent years Python has become a popular language for data science, and there has been increasing demand for a Python-based alternative to ISLR. Hence, this book (ISLP) covers the same materials as ISLR but with labs implemented in Python. These labs will be useful both for Python novices, as well as experienced users.

During the past decade there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it have come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book’s coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting---the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorization, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for “wide” data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie co-developed much of the statistical modeling software and environment in R/S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, projection pursuit and gradient boosting.

Advanced statistical modeling and knowledge representation techniques for a newly emerging area of machine learning and probabilistic reasoning; includes introductory material, tutorials for different proposed approaches, and applications. Handling inherent uncertainty and exploiting compositional structure are fundamental to understanding and designing large-scale systems. Statistical relational learning builds on ideas from probability theory and statistics to address uncertainty while incorporating tools from logic, databases and programming languages to represent structure. In Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning, leading researchers in this emerging area of machine learning describe current formalisms, models, and algorithms that enable effective and robust reasoning about richly structured systems and data. The early chapters provide tutorials for material used in later chapters, offering introductions to representation, inference and learning in graphical models, and logic. The book then describes object-oriented approaches, including probabilistic relational models, relational Markov networks, and probabilistic entity-relationship models as well as logic-based formalisms including Bayesian logic programs, Markov logic, and stochastic logic programs. Later chapters discuss such topics as probabilistic models with unknown objects, relational dependency networks, reinforcement learning in relational domains, and information extraction. By presenting a variety of approaches, the book highlights commonalities and clarifies important differences among proposed approaches and, along the way, identifies important representational and algorithmic issues. Numerous applications are provided throughout.

The implications for philosophy and cognitive science of developments in statistical learning theory. In Reliable Reasoning, Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni—a philosopher and an engineer—argue that philosophy and cognitive science can benefit from statistical learning theory (SLT), the theory that lies behind recent advances in machine learning. The philosophical problem of induction, for example, is in part about the reliability of inductive reasoning, where the reliability of a method is measured by its statistically expected percentage of errors—a central topic in SLT. After discussing philosophical attempts to evade the problem of induction, Harman and Kulkarni provide an admirably clear account of the basic framework of SLT and its implications for inductive reasoning. They explain the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension of a set of hypotheses and distinguish two kinds of inductive reasoning. The authors discuss various topics in machine learning, including nearest-neighbor methods, neural networks, and support vector machines. Finally, they describe transductive reasoning and suggest possible new models of human reasoning suggested by developments in SLT.

Summary Machine Learning in Action is unique book that blends the foundational theories of machine learning with the practical realities of building tools for everyday data analysis. You'll use the flexible Python programming language to build programs that implement algorithms for data classification, forecasting, recommendations, and higher-level features like summarization and simplification. About the Book A machine is said to learn when its performance improves with experience. Learning requires algorithms and programs that capture data and ferret out the interestingor useful patterns. Once the specialized domain of analysts and mathematicians, machine learning is becoming a skill needed by many. Machine Learning in Action is a clearly written tutorial for developers. It avoids academic language and takes you straight to the techniques you'll use in your day-to-day work. Many (Python) examples present the core algorithms of statistical data processing, data analysis, and data visualization in code you can reuse. You'll understand the concepts and how they fit in with tactical tasks like classification, forecasting, recommendations, and higher-level features like summarization and simplification. Readers need no prior experience with machine learning or statistical processing. Familiarity with Python is helpful. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside A no-nonsense introduction Examples showing common ML tasks Everyday data analysis Implementing classic algorithms like Apriori and Adaboos Table of Contents PART 1 CLASSIFICATION Machine learning basics Classifying with k-Nearest Neighbors Splitting datasets one feature at a time: decision trees Classifying with probability theory: naïve Bayes Logistic regression Support vector machines Improving classification with the AdaBoost meta algorithm PART 2 FORECASTING NUMERIC VALUES WITH REGRESSION Predicting numeric values: regression Tree-based regression PART 3 UNSUPERVISED LEARNING Grouping unlabeled items using k-means clustering Association analysis with the Apriori algorithm Efficiently finding frequent itemsets with FP-growth PART 4 ADDITIONAL TOOLS Using principal component analysis to simplify data Simplifying data with the singular value decomposition Big data and MapReduce