Book picks similar to
The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory by Vladimir N. Vapnik
machine-learning
mathematics
statistics
computer-science
Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision
Richard Hartley - 2000
This book covers relevant geometric principles and how to represent objects algebraically so they can be computed and applied. Recent major developments in the theory and practice of scene reconstruction are described in detail in a unified framework. Richard Hartley and Andrew Zisserman provide comprehensive background material and explain how to apply the methods and implement the algorithms. First Edition HB (2000): 0-521-62304-9
Numerical Optimization
Jorge Nocedal - 2000
One can trace its roots to the Calculus of Variations and the work of Euler and Lagrange. This natural and reasonable approach to mathematical programming covers numerical methods for finite-dimensional optimization problems. It begins with very simple ideas progressing through more complicated concepts, concentrating on methods for both unconstrained and constrained optimization.
Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications
Kenneth H. Rosen - 2000
These themes include mathematical reasoning, combinatorial analysis, discrete structures, algorithmic thinking, and enhanced problem-solving skills through modeling. Its intent is to demonstrate the relevance and practicality of discrete mathematics to all students. The Fifth Edition includes a more thorough and linear presentation of logic, proof types and proof writing, and mathematical reasoning. This enhanced coverage will provide students with a solid understanding of the material as it relates to their immediate field of study and other relevant subjects. The inclusion of applications and examples to key topics has been significantly addressed to add clarity to every subject. True to the Fourth Edition, the text-specific web site supplements the subject matter in meaningful ways, offering additional material for students and instructors. Discrete math is an active subject with new discoveries made every year. The continual growth and updates to the web site reflect the active nature of the topics being discussed. The book is appropriate for a one- or two-term introductory discrete mathematics course to be taken by students in a wide variety of majors, including computer science, mathematics, and engineering. College Algebra is the only explicit prerequisite.
Probabilistic Robotics
Sebastian Thrun - 2005
Building on the field of mathematical statistics, probabilistic robotics endows robots with a new level of robustness in real-world situations. This book introduces the reader to a wealth of techniques and algorithms in the field. All algorithms are based on a single overarching mathematical foundation. Each chapter provides example implementations in pseudo code, detailed mathematical derivations, discussions from a practitioner's perspective, and extensive lists of exercises and class projects. The book's Web site, www.probabilistic-robotics.org, has additional material. The book is relevant for anyone involved in robotic software development and scientific research. It will also be of interest to applied statisticians and engineers dealing with real-world sensor data.
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - 2017
This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster - 2004
It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun. As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive. The book's unique approach of providing a highly visual storyboard approach combined with a narrative on the art and practice of designing for fun is sure to be a hit with game and interactive designers.At first glance A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a book that will truly inspire and challenge game designers to think in new ways; however, its universal message will influence designers from all walks of life. This book captures the real essence of what drives us to seek out products and experiences that are truly fun and entertaining. The author masterfully presents his engaging theory by showing readers how many designs are lacking because they are predictable and not engaging enough. He then explains how great designers use different types of elements in new ways to make designs more fun and compelling. Anyone who is interested in design will enjoy how the book works on two levels--as a quick inspiration guide to game design, or as an informative discussion that details the insightful thinking from a great mind in the game industry.
From Mathematics to Generic Programming
Alexander A. Stepanov - 2014
If you're a reasonably proficient programmer who can think logically, you have all the background you'll need. Stepanov and Rose introduce the relevant abstract algebra and number theory with exceptional clarity. They carefully explain the problems mathematicians first needed to solve, and then show how these mathematical solutions translate to generic programming and the creation of more effective and elegant code. To demonstrate the crucial role these mathematical principles play in many modern applications, the authors show how to use these results and generalized algorithms to implement a real-world public-key cryptosystem. As you read this book, you'll master the thought processes necessary for effective programming and learn how to generalize narrowly conceived algorithms to widen their usefulness without losing efficiency. You'll also gain deep insight into the value of mathematics to programming--insight that will prove invaluable no matter what programming languages and paradigms you use. You will learn aboutHow to generalize a four thousand-year-old algorithm, demonstrating indispensable lessons about clarity and efficiencyAncient paradoxes, beautiful theorems, and the productive tension between continuous and discreteA simple algorithm for finding greatest common divisor (GCD) and modern abstractions that build on itPowerful mathematical approaches to abstractionHow abstract algebra provides the idea at the heart of generic programmingAxioms, proofs, theories, and models: using mathematical techniques to organize knowledge about your algorithms and data structuresSurprising subtleties of simple programming tasks and what you can learn from themHow practical implementations can exploit theoretical knowledge
Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity
Christos H. Papadimitriou - 1998
All chapters are supplemented by thought-provoking problems. A useful work for graduate-level students with backgrounds in computer science, operations research, and electrical engineering. "Mathematicians wishing a self-contained introduction need look no further." — American Mathematical Monthly.
Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment
Ben Fry - 2007
Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called "Processing". Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you:The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details Several example projects with the code to make them work Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want to convey about your data set The book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.
How to Lie with Statistics
Darrell Huff - 1954
Darrell Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than to inform.
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
George Gilder - 2018
Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade." “Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns. Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads. The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable. The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google. Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet. Life after Google is almost here. For fans of "Wealth and Poverty," "Knowledge and Power," and "The Scandal of Money."
Building Machine Learning Systems with Python
Willi Richert - 2013
Machine Learning with R
Brett Lantz - 2014
This practical guide that covers all of the need to know topics in a very systematic way. For each machine learning approach, each step in the process is detailed, from preparing the data for analysis to evaluating the results. These steps will build the knowledge you need to apply them to your own data science tasks.Intended for those who want to learn how to use R's machine learning capabilities and gain insight from your data. Perhaps you already know a bit about machine learning, but have never used R; or perhaps you know a little R but are new to machine learning. In either case, this book will get you up and running quickly. It would be helpful to have a bit of familiarity with basic programming concepts, but no prior experience is required.
Machine Learning Yearning
Andrew Ng
But building a machine learning system requires that you make practical decisions: Should you collect more training data? Should you use end-to-end deep learning? How do you deal with your training set not matching your test set? and many more. Historically, the only way to learn how to make these "strategy" decisions has been a multi-year apprenticeship in a graduate program or company. This is a book to help you quickly gain this skill, so that you can become better at building AI systems.
Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World
Leslie Valiant - 2013
We nevertheless muddle through even in the absence of theories of how to act. But how do we do it?In Probably Approximately Correct, computer scientist Leslie Valiant presents a masterful synthesis of learning and evolution to show how both individually and collectively we not only survive, but prosper in a world as complex as our own. The key is “probably approximately correct” algorithms, a concept Valiant developed to explain how effective behavior can be learned. The model shows that pragmatically coping with a problem can provide a satisfactory solution in the absence of any theory of the problem. After all, finding a mate does not require a theory of mating. Valiant’s theory reveals the shared computational nature of evolution and learning, and sheds light on perennial questions such as nature versus nurture and the limits of artificial intelligence.Offering a powerful and elegant model that encompasses life’s complexity, Probably Approximately Correct has profound implications for how we think about behavior, cognition, biological evolution, and the possibilities and limits of human and machine intelligence.