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Statistical Pattern Recognition, 2nd Edition
The most comprehensive book about machine learning
Review written by: Sandro Saitta From Switzerland
The book written by Andrew Webb is certainly the most comprehensive book related to machine learning. I have not been able to find any machine learning topic which is not treated in this book.
According to me, this book is more for a scientific audience for the simplest reason that the presentation gives more importance to equations than to application examples. It does not explain how to program machine learning algorithm but rather which algorithms exist and what is their mathematical background. Every technique is presented first using text and only then mathematical development is shown. Therefore, it is convenient for people preferring textual description as well as the ones preferring equations.
The book is very well structured. Every chapter starts with a textual introduction on the related issue and then describes several techniques to solve it. At the end, specific application examples are given. A large part is then devoted to summary, discussion, recommendations (not always), notes and references, and finally exercises. Topics are covered in a non standard way for people used to data mining practical books. After an introduction, density estimation techniques are explained. Then linear and non-linear discriminant analyzes. It goes on with decision trees, performance and feature selection to finish with clustering and some other additional topics. Although this book is written in a statistical point of view, it is certainly one of the most comprehensive resource for machine learning and data mining.
Very Bad treatment of the subject
Review written by: sarfraz saqib From germany
The author claims that this book is written for senior undergrads and gaduate students, on the contraray, of what he claimed, his treatment of the suject is very sketchy. He has written this book in a somewhat citational manner i.e not treating any details of the concerned topics whatsoever and only stating the facts directly like he is citing some kind of terminolgy and not intersted in giving the reader a thourough understanding of the subject.
He has given extensive references and urls and so this book is more like " I can't explain anything go search urself here".
I think its the most worst way anybody could adopt for writing a book. In my opinion the only purpose of this book was to have a publication on his credit.
I would strongly recommend any students to refrain from buying this one as it will not help you much in any way.
Or else if u realy like to use very expensive toilet paper then give this book a try.
This book is good guidance.
I recently started study about Pattern Recognition. This book is so well organized.
- Introduction to statistical pattern recognition
- Basic approaches to supervised classification via Bayes' rule and estimation of the class-conditional densities.
- Discriminant function approach to supervised classification.
- Techniques of exploratory data analysis.
- Additional topics on pattern recognition including performance assessment.
Especially, this book contains URL which concerned with topics. It is very useful!!