Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Predictive Data Analytics: Algorithms, Worked Examples, and Case Studies - The MIT Press

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Commendation Quotes: Erudite yet real-world relevant. It's true that predictive analytics and machine learning go hand-in-hand: To put it loosely, prediction depends on learning from past examples. And, while "Fundamentals" succeeds as a comprehensive university textbook covering exactly how that works, the authors also recognize that predictive analytics is today's most booming commercial application of machine learning. So, in an unusual turn, this highly enriching opus brings the concepts to light with industry case studies and best practices, ensuring you'll experience the real-world value and avoid getting lost in abstraction. Commendation Quotes: This book provides excellent descriptions of the key methods used in predictive analytics. However, the unique value of this book is the insight it provides into the practical applications of these methods. The case studies and the sections on data preparation and data quality reflect the real-world challenges in the effective use of predictive analytics. Commendation Quotes: This is a wonderful self-contained book that touches upon the essential aspects of machine learning and presents them in a clear and intuitive light. With its incremental discussions ranging from anecdotal accounts underlying the 'big idea' to more complex information theoretic, probabilistic, statistic, and optimization theoretic concepts, its emphasis on how to turn a business problem into an analytics solution, and its pertinent case studies and illustrations, this book makes for an easy and compelling read, which I recommend greatly to anyone interested in finding out more about machine learning and its applications to predictive analytics. Publisher Marketing: 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 of these models in the broader business context. After discussing the trajectory from data to insight to decision, the book describes four approaches to machine learning: information-based learning, similarity-based learning, probability-based learning, and error-based learning. Each of these approaches is introduced by a nontechnical explanation of the underlying concept, followed by mathematical models and algorithms illustrated by detailed worked examples. Finally, the book considers techniques for evaluating prediction models and offers two case studies that describe specific data analytics projects through each phase of development, from formulating the business problem to implementation of the analytics solution. The book, informed by the authors' many years of teaching machine learning, and working on predictive data analytics projects, is suitable for use by undergraduates in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or statistics; by graduate students in disciplines with applications for predictive data analytics; and as a reference for professionals.

Contributor Bio:  Kelleher, John D John D. Kelleher is a Lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and a founding member of DIT's Applied Intelligence Research Center. Contributor Bio:  D'Arcy, Aoife Aoife D'Arcy is CEO of The Analytics Store, a data analytics consultancy and training company.