I have been a machine learning engineer applying my ML expertise in computational advertising, and search domain. I am an author of 8 machine learning books. My first book was ranked the #1 bestseller in its category on Amazon in 2017 and 2018 and was translated into many languages. I am also a ML education enthusiast and used to teach ML courses in Toronto, Canada.
I wrote
Python Machine Learning By Example: Build intelligent systems using Python, TensorFlow 2, PyTorch, and scikit-learn
This could be the first stop of your brand new machine learning journey. I personally like how the technical concept is translated into plain English – each chapter starts with a high-level overview of a ML algorithm or methodology, concise and clear, followed by lots of visual examples and real world scenarios. I can guarantee you won’t get lost halfway. The book focuses on getting you introduced to ML with minimal math. But if you want to grasp some more of math, the next book I recommend is waiting for you.
NOTICE: To buy the newest edition of this book (2021), please search "Machine Learning Absolute Beginners Third Edition" on Amazon. The product page you are currently viewing is for the 2nd Edition (2017) of this book.
Featured by Tableau as the first of "7 Books About Machine Learning for Beginners."
Ready to spin up a virtual GPU instance and smash through petabytes of data? Want to add 'Machine Learning' to your LinkedIn profile?
Well, hold on there...
Before you embark on your epic journey, there are some high-level theory and statistical principles to weave through first. But rather than spend…
The book is a well-curated collection of the essential mathematical concepts that form ML. You may experience a cultural shock jumping to this book from the previous one, because the writing in this book is a bit formal. However, it is the missing but necessary piece for building solid foundations for practical ML. You will find it more valuable combining the intuition behind ML that you gained previously. And the explanations in the book are succinct and from the ML perspectives. For instance, partial derivatives are explained in terms of neural network weight optimization. I wish the concepts in Linear Algebra, Vector Calculus, and Probability courses back in college were introduced this way so I understand better how they are applied.
The fundamental mathematical tools needed to understand machine learning include linear algebra, analytic geometry, matrix decompositions, vector calculus, optimization, probability and statistics. These topics are traditionally taught in disparate courses, making it hard for data science or computer science students, or professionals, to efficiently learn the mathematics. This self-contained textbook bridges the gap between mathematical and machine learning texts, introducing the mathematical concepts with a minimum of prerequisites. It uses these concepts to derive four central machine learning methods: linear regression, principal component analysis, Gaussian mixture models and support vector machines. For students and others with a mathematical background, these…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
By
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
This book is more advanced than the first book I recommended. It presents ML theoretical and practical aspects step-by-step from the bottom up. Each chapter elaborates at length on a core building block in the ML life cycle. For example, feature engineering, supervised learning, and model evaluation have their own separate chapters, with intuitive discussions of how they work. Most of the concept is taught through the simple yet powerful Python Module Scikit-Learn so it won’t overburden you with heavy programming. This book will be perfect for practitioners with some understanding of statistics and linear algebra.
Machine learning has become an integral part of many commercial applications and research projects, but this field is not exclusive to large companies with extensive research teams. If you use Python, even as a beginner, this book will teach you practical ways to build your own machine learning solutions. With all the data available today, machine learning applications are limited only by your imagination. You'll learn the steps necessary to create a successful machine-learning application with Python and the scikit-learn library. Authors Andreas Muller and Sarah Guido focus on the practical aspects of using machine learning algorithms, rather than the…
This was my favorite book when I started my career. It talks about how information is processed, in an intelligent way, in the internet age. It acts as a tutorial to teach developers how to code our own ML programs, from online dating services, to document analyzer, and search engine. The author did an excellent job of explaining abstract ML algorithms with clear examples. His coding style in Python reads clearly, which makes the book more beginner-friendly.
Don’t get disappointed when you know this book is more than a decade old. It was a visionary book back in the day and it is still relevant today.
Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing,…
Another practical book that I highly recommend. Its intuitive structure is the first thing I like about it. It gives you a comprehensive walkthrough of the ML workflow, from data exploration to learning. It covers abundant practical guides that get you prepared for real world challenges, such as how to handle outliers and to impute missing data. As a ML practitioner, I appreciate the dedicated case studies throughout the entire book. They really excite learners for future real world applications.
The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to machine learning approaches used in predictive data analytics, covering both theory and practice.
Machine learning is often used to build predictive models by extracting patterns from large datasets. These models are used in predictive data analytics applications including price prediction, risk assessment, predicting customer behavior, and document classification. This introductory textbook offers a detailed and focused treatment of the most important machine learning approaches used in predictive data analytics, covering both theoretical concepts and practical applications. Technical and mathematical material is augmented with explanatory worked examples, and case studies illustrate the application…
Python Machine Learning By Example begins with an introduction to important ML concepts and implementations using Python. Each chapter of the book walks you through an industry-adopted application. At the same time, this book provides actionable insights into the key fundamentals of ML with Python.
You’ll understand how to tackle data-driven problems and implement your solutions with popular Python packages such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, and Keras. By the end of the book, you’ll have put together a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed in the best practices for applying ML techniques to make the most out of new opportunities.
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
By
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
