Machine Learning Review

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(More customer reviews)I agree with some of the previous reviews which criticize the book for its lack of depth, but I believe this to be an asset rather than a liability given its target audience (seniors and beginning grad. students). The average college senior typically knows very little about subjects like neural networks, genetic algorithms, or Baysian networks, and this book goes a long way in demystifying these subjects in a very clear, concise, and understandable way. Moreover, the first-year grad. student who is interested in possibly doing research in this field needs more of an overview than to dive deeply into
one of the many branches which themselves have had entire books written about them. This is one of the few if only books where one will find diverse areas of learning (e.g. analytical, reinforcment, Bayesian, neural-network, genetic-algorithmic) all within the same cover.
But more than just an encyclopedic introduction, the author makes a number of connections between the different paradigms. For example, he explains that associated with each paradigm is the notion of an inductive-learning bias, i.e. the underlying assumptions that lend validity to a given learning approach. These end-of-chapter discussions on bias seem very interesting and unique to this book.
Finally, I used this book for part of the reading material for an intro. AI class, and received much positive feedback from the students, although some did find the presentation a bit too abstract for their undergraduate tastes

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This exciting addition to the McGraw-Hill Series in Computer Science focuses on the concepts and techniques that contribute to the rapidly changing field of machine learning--including probability and statistics, artificial intelligence, and neural networks--unifying them all in a logical and coherent manner. Machine Learning serves as a useful reference tool for software developers and researchers, as well as an outstanding text for college students.

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Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm surprisingly please with this book. I've been reading up on the topic and associated algorithms in other books for some time; I'm a software developer but don't have a statistics background, and so felt a lot of the texts were too focused on the math and the theory while being thin on content when it came to "rubber hitting the road", or even using clear, simple examples and straight-forward notation.
This book is so well-written that it communicates the concepts clearly, lucidly and in an organized fashion. The section that introduces Bayesian probability was drop-dead simple to follow. Quite frankly, having read a few other treatments on it, I can now say that everything else I read before this was overly complicated. Brevity is the soul of wit, no?
To the reviewer who criticized the authors use of words to describe equations: This is what the authors intended to do. Would you fault them for writing in English if you wanted Greek? Not everyone who can benefit from applied data mining has the requisite background to understand the nitty gritty mathematics, nor should they have to, if they just want to understand the behavior and practical applications of the technology.

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Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) Review

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(More customer reviews)Witten and Frank have generated a book that is readable without eliminating all technical (yes, even mathematical!) descriptions of the key data mining algorithms. And they are up-to-date, including support vector machines and boosting. There are sufficient examples of the techniques to provide readers with a good feel for what each technique can accomplish. For example, how many books can provide a readable explanation of support vector machines?
There are some quibbles, such as not including any discussion of neural networks (noted in Ch. 1 with another reference)--I believe it deserves some attention because of its widespread use. Additionally, future editions should include a least a brief summary of data preprocessing, input selection, feature creation, etc. But these are quibbles.
The Java portion of the book is not of as much interest to me, but for those wishing to implement the algorithms, it provides a nice blueprint (from the code I looked at).
For what they have undertaken, they have performed admirably, and I would highly recommend this book.

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Introduction to Information Retrieval Review

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(More customer reviews)I am a big fan of the authors 1999 book on Statistical Natural Language Processing, and I and was thrilled when I found this new book online -- just search for "Information Retrieval" on Google.
In these two books, they describe the theory behind a vast toolbox which can be used to construct new tools/products for the Internet. Now I can go back to them when the need arises.
For starters, I appreciate the detailed theoretical explanations of topics that I could not find in other texts, and the references to related work are especially helpful. One of the other books I read was Information Retrieval by Grossman, which is an older book but has a more condensed style compared to this. Grossman's discussion of clustering was more high level and referenced a few more papers that I found useful. That helped increase my interest to read through these chapters in which offer greater detail.
Before I felt like I could place each topic in its appropriate context, I had to spend six months of reading both the books, playing with code and finding s/w packages, searching the research literature, reading papers and other books, and then cycling back to the books. Here's are some suggestions for things I'd like to see:
1. A set of recomended programming tools: in some books on Perl -- such as the chapter "Natural Language Tools" in pages 149-171 in "Advanced Perl Programming" by Simon Cozens (O'Reilly) -- you get a very "quick & dirty" introduction to maybe 20-30% of the concepts in these two books along with ways to implement and play around with them. Although Perl has many natural language processing tools, the Cozens book cuts to the chase, explains which are the best tools, and shows you how to use them. I think knowing such shortcuts aids in learning how to apply and improve on them. The more complex and sophisticated topics, the more likely to make it out into the real world if they are easy to play with.
2. More data/examples on what does/doesn't work with end-users: Numbers, graphs, and charts are all good stuff. I always appreciate it when the authors referenced quantitative comparisons, real-world products, and history of Internet. One of the reasons I had to consult the research literature was to broaden my understanding of quantitative comparisons between different techniques involving end-users, which were typically done in the context of complete systems studies that users could try out.
Thanks,
-Sri

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Class-tested and coherent, this groundbreaking new textbook teaches web-era information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. Written from a computer science perspective by three leading experts in the field, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Although originally designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also create a buzz for researchers and professionals alike.

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