75 books like Probabilistic Machine Learning

By Kevin P. Murphy,

Here are 75 books that Probabilistic Machine Learning fans have personally recommended if you like Probabilistic Machine Learning. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Book cover of Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms

Simon J.D. Prince Author Of Understanding Deep Learning

From my list on machine learning and deep neural networks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.

Simon's book list on machine learning and deep neural networks

Simon J.D. Prince Why did Simon love this book?

The best parts of this book really represent a gold standard in pedagogical clarity.

Although it’s now twenty years old, there is still much to learn from this rather unconventional book that covers the boundary between machine learning, information theory, and Bayesian methods. There are also odd tangents and curiosities, some of which work better than others but are never dull.

Just writing this review makes me want to go back to it and squeeze more out of it.

By David JC MacKay,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Information theory and inference, taught together in this exciting textbook, lie at the heart of many important areas of modern technology - communication, signal processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and cryptography. The book introduces theory in tandem with applications. Information theory is taught alongside practical communication systems such as arithmetic coding for data compression and sparse-graph codes for error-correction. Inference techniques, including message-passing algorithms, Monte Carlo methods and variational approximations, are developed alongside applications to clustering, convolutional codes, independent component analysis, and neural networks. Uniquely, the book covers state-of-the-art error-correcting codes, including low-density-parity-check codes, turbo…


Book cover of Dive into Deep Learning

Simon J.D. Prince Author Of Understanding Deep Learning

From my list on machine learning and deep neural networks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.

Simon's book list on machine learning and deep neural networks

Simon J.D. Prince Why did Simon love this book?

This is the practical book that best accompanies my book (which is more about the underlying ideas.)

If you want a book that will show you how deep learning systems are built in practice, then this is the best place to start. It’s full of code snippets that translate between theory and building real systems.

By Aston Zhang, Zachary C. Lipton, Mu Li , Alexander J. Smola

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Dive into Deep Learning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Deep learning has revolutionized pattern recognition, introducing tools that power a wide range of technologies in such diverse fields as computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition. Applying deep learning requires you to simultaneously understand how to cast a problem, the basic mathematics of modeling, the algorithms for fitting your models to data, and the engineering techniques to implement it all. This book is a comprehensive resource that makes deep learning approachable, while still providing sufficient technical depth to enable engineers, scientists, and students to use deep learning in their own work. No previous background in machine learning…


Book cover of The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us

Simon J.D. Prince Author Of Understanding Deep Learning

From my list on machine learning and deep neural networks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.

Simon's book list on machine learning and deep neural networks

Simon J.D. Prince Why did Simon love this book?

This is a popular science book, so a little different from the others on this list. It is a beautifully written book that is accessible to people who don’t know much about AI but is simultaneously thought-provoking for experts.

It contains probably the best discussion of "intelligence" that I've read, interesting insights into how Google and other tech giants came to develop their machine learning strategy, and a fascinating chapter that views recommendation engines and their users as parts of a single intelligent organism. It's concise and easy to read.

I've read many popular AI books, which are highly variable in quality, and this criminally underappreciated work is the best by miles. 

By Nello Cristianini,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Shortcut as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

- The author is one of the most influential AI reseachers of recent decades.

- Written in an accessible language, the book provides a probing account of AI today and proposes a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that happened in the recent tumultuous past and enable us to think soberly about the road ahead.

- The book is divided into ten carefully crafted and easily-digestible chapters, each grapples with an important question for AI, ranging from the scientific concepts that underpin the technology to wider implications for society, using real examples wherever possible.


Book cover of Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning: Theory and Practice in Python

Simon J.D. Prince Author Of Understanding Deep Learning

From my list on machine learning and deep neural networks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.

Simon's book list on machine learning and deep neural networks

Simon J.D. Prince Why did Simon love this book?

Of course, this is not the obvious book to recommend for reinforcement learning, but if you are a beginner, then it’s a quick and easy place to start. It’s compact and gets straight into the main algorithms.

It has a good balance between theory and code and will get you up and running quickly.

By Laura Graesser, Wah Loon Keng,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Contemporary Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning that Combines Theory and Practice

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) combines deep learning and reinforcement learning, in which artificial agents learn to solve sequential decision-making problems. In the past decade deep RL has achieved remarkable results on a range of problems, from single and multiplayer games-such as Go, Atari games, and DotA 2-to robotics.

Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning is an introduction to deep RL that uniquely combines both theory and implementation. It starts with intuition, then carefully explains the theory of deep RL algorithms, discusses implementations in its companion software library SLM…


Book cover of Deep Learning

Martin Musiol Author Of Generative AI: Navigating the Course to the Artificial General Intelligence Future

From my list on future-proof yourself for the AI era.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for generative AI first ignited in 2016 when I spoke about it at a conference, and ever since then, I can’t stop! I've created an online course, a newsletter and even wrote a book to spread knowledge on this groundbreaking technology. As an instructor, I empower others to explore the boundless potential of generative AI applications. Day in day out, I assist clients in crafting their own generative AI solutions, tailoring them to their unique needs.

Martin's book list on future-proof yourself for the AI era

Martin Musiol Why did Martin love this book?

I truly believe that this is the book that brought my generation of AI experts into the fold. Despite having studied AI and ML, this book took me by the hand and grounded me in the fundamentals. I love the fact that it covers everything from mathematical basics to industry-level techniques.

Written by the OGs of deep learning, it's an absolute must-read for anyone serious about the field. Highly recommend for students and engineers alike.

By Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Deep Learning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An introduction to a broad range of topics in deep learning, covering mathematical and conceptual background, deep learning techniques used in industry, and research perspectives.

“Written by three experts in the field, Deep Learning is the only comprehensive book on the subject.”
—Elon Musk, cochair of OpenAI; cofounder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX

Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all…


Book cover of Advanced Methods and Deep Learning in Computer Vision

Mark S. Nixon Author Of Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision

From my list on computer vision from a veteran professor.

Why am I passionate about this?

It’s been fantastic to work in computer vision, especially when it is used to build biometric systems. I and my 80 odd PhD students have pioneered systems that recognise people by the way they walk, by their ears, and many other new things too. To build the systems, we needed computer vision techniques and architectures, both of which work with complex real-world imagery. That’s what computer vision gives you: a capability to ‘see’ using a computer. I think we can still go a lot further: to give blind people sight, to enable better invasive surgery, to autonomise more of our industrial society, and to give us capabilities we never knew we’d have.

Mark's book list on computer vision from a veteran professor

Mark S. Nixon Why did Mark love this book?

The advances of deep learning have been awesome, and fast. It’s been hard for the textbooks to keep up, so it’s good to include one that describes the advances and state of art very well. It seems appropriate that it’s edited by two leading researchers who are Roy – who described computer vision systems implementations in a long series of excellent books – and Matt, whose work on face recognition revolutionised and transformed the progress of face recognition in the 1990s. This book gives you an image of where we are now in computer vision, and where we are going. 

By E.R. Davies (editor), Matthew Turk (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Advanced Methods and Deep Learning in Computer Vision as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Advanced Methods and Deep Learning in Computer Vision presents advanced computer vision methods, emphasizing machine and deep learning techniques that have emerged during the past 5-10 years. The book provides clear explanations of principles and algorithms supported with applications. Topics covered include machine learning, deep learning networks, generative adversarial networks, deep reinforcement learning, self-supervised learning, extraction of robust features, object detection, semantic segmentation, linguistic descriptions of images, visual search, visual tracking, 3D shape retrieval, image inpainting, novelty and anomaly detection.

This book provides easy learning for researchers and practitioners of advanced computer vision methods, but it is also suitable as…


Book cover of Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and Pytorch: AI Applications Without a PhD

Jakub Langr Author Of GANs in Action: Deep Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks

From my list on applied deep learning.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been working in machine learning for about a decade. I’ve always been more interested in applied than theoretical problems and while blogs and MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are a great way to learn, for certain deep topics only a book would do. I also teach at University of Oxford, University of Birmingham, and various FTSE100 companies. My machine learning has exposed me to many fascinating problems—from leading my own ML-focused startup through Y Combinator—to working at various companies as a consultant. I think there is currently no great curriculum for the practitioners really wanting to apply deep learning in practical cases, so I have given it my best shot.

Jakub's book list on applied deep learning

Jakub Langr Why did Jakub love this book?

Jeremy Howard is the lead author and has always been a world-class educator. This book is based on his fast.ai course, which has managed to splice all rigor, simplicity, and cutting edge techniques into one course. It also uses its custom fast.ai framework built on PyTorch, which is the dominant language for researchers. This book is very practically oriented and gets you off the ground very quickly with your own projects!

By Jeremy Howard, Sylvain Gugger,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and Pytorch as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Deep learning is often viewed as the exclusive domain of math PhDs and big tech companies. But as this hands-on guide demonstrates, programmers comfortable with Python can achieve impressive results in deep learning with little math background, small amounts of data, and minimal code. How? With fastai, the first library to provide a consistent interface to the most frequently used deep learning applications.

Authors Jeremy Howard and Sylvain Gugger, the creators of fastai, show you how to train a model on a wide range of tasks using fastai and PyTorch. You'll also dive progressively further into deep learning theory to…


Book cover of Practical Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Guide to Building Real-World NLP Systems

Valliappa Lakshmanan Author Of Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and Mlops

From my list on to become a machine learning engineer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been building real-time, production machine learning models for over 20 years. My book, and my book recommendations, are informed by that experience. I have a lot of empathy for people who are new to machine learning because I’ve taught courses on the topic. I founded the Advanced Solutions Lab at Google where we helped data scientists working for Google Cloud customers (who already knew ML) become ML engineers capable of building reliable ML models. The first two are the books I’d recommend today to newcomers and the last three to folks attending the ASL. 

Valliappa's book list on to become a machine learning engineer

Valliappa Lakshmanan Why did Valliappa love this book?

This recommendation is a bit of a cheat — I’m not recommending this exact book, but one of the books in the series that this book is part of.

Once you have the first two books under your belt, you’ll know how to solve ML problems. But you will keep reinventing the wheel. What you need next is a book on common “ML tricks” — best practices and common techniques when doing ML in production.

The problem is that these tricks are specific to the type of data that you will be processing. If you are going to be processing images or time series, read the corresponding books in the same series instead.

By Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Practical Natural Language Processing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Many books and courses tackle natural language processing (NLP) problems with toy use cases and well-defined datasets. But if you want to build, iterate, and scale NLP systems in a business setting and tailor them for particular industry verticals, this is your guide. Software engineers and data scientists will learn how to navigate the maze of options available at each step of the journey.

Through the course of the book, authors Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, and Harshit Surana will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. You'll learn how to…


Book cover of Deep Learning with Python

Jakub Langr Author Of GANs in Action: Deep Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks

From my list on applied deep learning.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been working in machine learning for about a decade. I’ve always been more interested in applied than theoretical problems and while blogs and MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are a great way to learn, for certain deep topics only a book would do. I also teach at University of Oxford, University of Birmingham, and various FTSE100 companies. My machine learning has exposed me to many fascinating problems—from leading my own ML-focused startup through Y Combinator—to working at various companies as a consultant. I think there is currently no great curriculum for the practitioners really wanting to apply deep learning in practical cases, so I have given it my best shot.

Jakub's book list on applied deep learning

Jakub Langr Why did Jakub love this book?

This is a fantastic book to get you started. It is written by the author of a leading deep learning framework Keras, which makes even Tensorflow very easy to use. Chollet is a true leader of the deep learning craft and the Manning team always does an excellent job of forcing authors to make the subject matter accessible. Highly recommended!

By Francois Chollet,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Deep Learning with Python as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"The first edition of Deep Learning with Python is one of the best books on the subject. The second edition made it even better." - Todd Cook

The bestseller revised! Deep Learning with Python, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to the field of deep learning using Python and the powerful Keras library. Written by Google AI researcher Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, this revised edition has been updated with new chapters, new tools, and cutting-edge techniques drawn from the latest research. You'll build your understanding through practical examples and intuitive explanations that make the complexities of deep learning…


Book cover of How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

Jakub Langr Author Of GANs in Action: Deep Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks

From my list on applied deep learning.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been working in machine learning for about a decade. I’ve always been more interested in applied than theoretical problems and while blogs and MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are a great way to learn, for certain deep topics only a book would do. I also teach at University of Oxford, University of Birmingham, and various FTSE100 companies. My machine learning has exposed me to many fascinating problems—from leading my own ML-focused startup through Y Combinator—to working at various companies as a consultant. I think there is currently no great curriculum for the practitioners really wanting to apply deep learning in practical cases, so I have given it my best shot.

Jakub's book list on applied deep learning

Jakub Langr Why did Jakub love this book?

While technically not about deep learning, this book is fantastic for those interested in pursuing applied or practical machine learning problems. While the central thesis of a topic can be reduced to “Frequently, models are valuable simply by reducing uncertainty,” it is definitely worth a read as there’s a lot of deep thinking in this book!

By Douglas W. Hubbard,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How to Measure Anything as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now updated with new measurement methods and new examples, How to Measure Anything shows managers how to inform themselves in order to make less risky, more profitable business decisions This insightful and eloquent book will show you how to measure those things in your own business, government agency or other organization that, until now, you may have considered "immeasurable," including customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility, technology risk, and technology ROI. * Adds new measurement methods, showing how they can be applied to a variety of areas such as risk management and customer satisfaction * Simplifies overall content while still making the…


Book cover of Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
Book cover of Dive into Deep Learning
Book cover of The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,189

readers submitted
so far, will you?

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in machine learning, probability, and deep learning?

Machine Learning 53 books
Probability 21 books
Deep Learning 20 books