Any good book on Machine Learning?

[IlyaKEightSix]

So I landed a new gig (those who'd read my blog would know) at a startup being the source of numbers expertise, but I want to find a good book on Machine Learning--that is, one that tells you the tools in relatively straightforward fashion without bogging you down in derivations, proofs, and exercises which do the same.

My mentor gave me Hastie's elements of statistical learning 2E to read, but, he's really heavy-handed with the math (it's a book written for PhD theoreticians I feel), and I just need some basic algorithms to screw around with on an ad-hoc basis.

Anybody care to point me in a good direction?

 

[alain]

you will like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Learning-Knowledge-Discovery/dp/1439810184/

also check this:

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Perspective-Recognition/dp/1420067184/

You can still download Hastie from here

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

 

[atreides]

So I landed a new gig (those who'd read my blog would know) at a startup being the source of numbers expertise, but I want to find a good book on Machine Learning--that is, one that tells you the tools in relatively straightforward fashion without bogging you down in derivations, proofs, and exercises which do the same.

My mentor gave me Hastie's elements of statistical learning 2E to read, but, he's really heavy-handed with the math (it's a book written for PhD theoreticians I feel), and I just need some basic algorithms to screw around with on an ad-hoc basis.

Anybody care to point me in a good direction?

Since you seem to use R, you'll probably like the first book alain recommended better. The implementations in the second book is in python, and you'll have to handle a bit more math in the second book

 

[kirylm]

For Neural Networks this is a good book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534943322/

 

[Mr Doe]

Your mentor suggested a really good book; if you think you're going to stick with the subject/company for longer than, say, 6 months, you should definitely dig deeper into the book. And, there's actually no "heavy-handed math" in it.

 

[mcastro]

In our Machine Learning Class we put 4 books on reserve:
1. Hastie's Elements of Statistical Learning (which your mentor suggested);
2. Alpaydin's Intro to Machine Learning (A great survey without as much rigor);
3. Marsland's Machine Learning, An Algorithmic Perspective (More practical and code-focused with Python examples);
4. Mitchell's Machine Learning (A classic, but now a bit dated).

I'd suggest looking online at the table of contents and a few pages inside to figure out which one is at the right level for your needs before buying.

Hope this helps.

Miguel Castro

 

[damcgib]

You Gotta try Intro to Pattern Recognition: A MATLAB Approach, it is the companion to a text book but it will get you going fast. Here is the free pdf:
http://cs.nenu.edu.cn/Lunwen/2010050414492173499.pdf
Personally I think it is worth owning the text though.