This book presents basic ideas of machine learning in a way that is easy to understand, by providing hands-on practical advice, using simple examples, and motivating students with discussions of interesting applications. The main topics include Bayesian classifiers, nearest-neighbor classifiers, linear and polynomial classifiers, decision trees, neural networks, and support vector machines. Later chapters show how to combine these simple tools by way of "boosting," how to exploit them in more complicated domains, and how to deal with diverse advanced practical issues. One chapter is dedicated to the popular genetic algorithms.
A Simple Machine-Learning Task.- Probabilities: Bayesian Classifiers.- Similarities: Nearest-Neighbor Classifiers.- Inter-Class Boundaries: Linear and Polynomial Classifiers.- Artificial Neural Networks.- Decision Trees.- Computational Learning Theory.- A Few Instructive Applications.- Induction of Voting Assemblies.- Some Practical Aspects to Know About.- Performance Evaluation.-Statistical Significance.- The Genetic Algorithm.- Reinforcement learning.
"It is superbly organized: each section includes a "what have you learned" summary, and every chapter has a short summary, accompanying (brief) historical remarks, and a slew of exercises. ... In most of the chapters, there are very clear examples, well chosen and illustrated, that really help the reader understand each concept. ... I did learn quite a bit about very basic machine learning by reading this book." (Jacques Carette, Computing Reviews, January, 2016)
