The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) Hardcover – 9 Feb. 2009

Some context first: I'm studying my fourth year in a computer engineering program, having studied lightweight mathematics courses only, which is basically calculus, linear algebra, discrete mathematics and matematical statistics. Our machine learning course has two recommended literatures of which "The Elements of Statistical Learning" (ESL) was one of them, while the primary was Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (PRML).My experience with the book so far if very positive. It contains incredibly relevant machine learning methods/tools which many other books, most notably PRML, doesn't touch upon or at least explain very shortly, which are extensively used in practice. Most notably: Support Vector Machines, Random Forests and Ensemble Learning. Also, the structure of ESL has made a lot more sense to me compared to PRML, it wraps parts of the field into more easily digestible chunks, and therefore makes for a better reference than PRML (just compare the table of contents). Also, as the authors themselves point out, the book itself will rather the reader understands the intuition, algorithm and the cases in which they perform good/bad rather than the mathematical background/proofs behind them (don't worry, most of them are still presented in ESL though). In conclusion, if you can accept the skimming of proof and some rigour in ESL, this book is perfect, and summarizes a large part of the field in such a way that even a mathematically mediocre computer scientist is able to somewhat grasp and apply in real world problems. However, if you want to get the entire picture, you might want to read both ESL and PRML, which will give you some of that Bayesian goodies as well.

Having completed the Coursera Stanford Machine Learning course I wanted to know more and this came up at the top recommended book in Amazon for ML. I downloaded the free PDF but it's huge and I find it impossible to read a PDF on a screen so I forked out for the hardback paper copy. I have to say this is well worth it, incredible scope of coverage and the colouring makes it more easy to understand (none of this stuff is actually 'easy'). This IMO is genuinely THE bible for Machine Learning.

You need to have very great mathematical basis to understand many content in this book, It's a very good one if you want a deeper insight of reinforcement learning.

excellent quality, highly recommended

as desribed.

Arrived in excellent condition.

Very good

Very good book