Customer Reviews

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The book is written by some of the biggest names currently in the field, and thus is written at a certain level, this isn't a fault of the book or the authers, but rather it was written for a specific audience. However I did find it odd when they would occassionally explain basic readily known notation, but later on assume the reader is familiar with what I would regard as advanced notation, or leave out quite a few steps in their mathematics assuming the reader understands what they did. This book covers a wide range of techniques ranging from the more traditional to the current, and for each topic presents an overview of the technique and provides adequate references for further exploration.

The reader should have a good underlying understanding of linear algebra, statistics and probability theory and also be familiar with the techniques presented here. This book was used in a graduate engineering data mining class, and most of us struggled greatly with the book. This book probably would have been more appropriate if this was a book to augment another text, or if this had not been the first time we had seen topics such as those presented, this being the book to explain neural networks, support vector machines and whatnot when you've never seen them before makes for a very bewildering experience, but once you find a few journal articles the techniques actually are fairly easy to understand.

The book does not explain how to implement using software any of the techniques, this is a topic left up to other books, such as Modern Applied Statistics with S by Ripley and Venerables, and only in their discussion about apriori for association rules did I see that they state a software package. It would have been nice if they would have given some insight into how they created some of the great graphics that punctuate the book, perhaps as additional material on the website.

A book that is more down to earth for engineers, albeit different in scope, would be Duda and Hart's Pattern Classification, which I believe are electrical engineers and written more from an engineering standpoint. In addition the Duda and Hard book gives a lot of applications-based problems and has an associated MATLAB handbook to walk readers through building many types of learners, while this book the end-of-chapter excercises are almost exclusively proofs and theoretical excercises. Not a fault of the book, but rather just a difference and depends on what the reader wants to get out of it.

Ultimately, even though it did prove to be a rather confusing book, I have learned a lot from it and will continue to go through it to learn even more from it as it does tend to become more lucid the more I go through it.

I use data mining tools in my financial engineering and financial modeling work and I have found this book to be very useful. This book provides two crucial types of information. First, it provides enough theory to allow a potential user to understand the essential insights that motivate specific techniques and to evaluate the situations in which those technique are appropriate. Second, the book gives the exact algorithms to implement the various techniques.
While no book I have seen covers every data mining methodology available, this one has the strongest coverage I have seen in additive models, non-linear regression, and CART/MART (regression/classification trees). It also has very strong coverage in many other areas. I highly recommend it.

The book by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman is a welcome
addition to the quickly growing area of machine learning
and data mining. This is a well written book, laid out
nicely with excellent examples by 3 well established
researchers in the field. It will be helpful to those
who are interested in learning about this field, as well
as experts who want to know more

My only complaint is that although the authors do
make an honest attempt to clearly highlight methods
that are based on their own research,
often this distinction becomes cloudy and the reader
is left with the impression that the methods
advocated are often the best and represent
the standard in the industry. In fact many of
their ideas are only heuristic and it is more than
conceivable that these will eventually be superseeded
with better methods.

A good book, which gets you up to speed in the literature
but it will only be relevant for a few years.

Data mining is a field developed by computer scientists but many of its crucial elements are imbedded in important and subtle statistical concepts. Statisticians can play an important role in the development of this field but as was the case with artificial intelligence, expert systems and neural networks the statistical research community has been slow to respond. Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman are changing this.
Friedman has been a major player in pattern recognition of high dimensional data, in tree classification, regularized discriminant analysis and multivariate adaptive regression splines. He has also done some exciting new research on boosting methods.

Hastie and Tibshirani invented additive models which are very general types of regression models. Tibshirani invented the lasso method and is a leader among the researchers on bootstrap. Hastie invented principal curves and surfaces.

These tools and the expertise of these authors make them naturals to contribute to advances in data mining. They come with great expertise and see data mining from the statistical perspective. They see it as part of a more general process of statistical learning from data.

The book is well written and illustrated with many pretty color graphs and figures. Color adds a dimension in pattern recognition and the authors exploit it in this book. It is really the first of its kind that treats data mining from a statistical perspective and is so comprehensive and up-to-date.

The important statistical tools that are covered in this book include under the category of supervised learning; regression, discriminant analysis, kernel methods, model assessment and selection, bootstrapping, maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference, additive models, classification and regression trees, multivariate adaptive regression splines, boosting, regularization methods, nearest neighbor classification, k means clustering algorithms and neural networks. These methods are illustrated using real problems.

Similarly under the category of unsupervised learning, clustering and association are covered. They cover the latest developments in principal components and principal curves, multidimensional scaling, factor analysis and projection pursuit.

This book is innovative and fresh. It is an important contribution that will become a classic. The level is between intermediate and advanced. Good for an advanced special topics course for graduate students in statistics. A comparable text is the text by Mannila, Hand and Smyth.

This book made effective use of color and maintained a competitive price. This had a major impact on publishers like Wiley that could not sell a book at this size and initial price. Wiley is still looking for a book comparable to this one that they can use to compete with Springer-Verlag. I know this information because I heard from the Wiley acquisitions editor that I worked with on my two books.

This is not an introduction to statistical learning theory. It is a collection of overviews of various statistical methods presented rather than explained to the reader. In order to benefit from this book the reader should have a good background in matrix algebra and should already have a theoretical and working knowledge of the topics covered. For detail on the methods and their real world application the reader should also be prepared to consult other references. Two stars because, fairly or not, it does not have the pedagogical value that I expected of it.

Among my commercial data mining friends this book is considered to be the bible. It is worth having just to assess the mindset of the day-to-day data miners. The book discusses many data mining issues in more depth than most of the earlier works on this subject. However it still lacks the the depth and counsel of, say, applied multiple regression books (cf. Draper and Smith) that give guidance on when a particular method may give false results or how bogus results can be detected posteriori.

This is one of the best books in a difficult field to survey and summarize. Like 'Pattern Recognition', 'Statistical Learning' is an umbrella term for a broad range of techniques of varying complexity, rigor and acceptance by practitioners in the field. The audience for such a text ranges from the user requiring a code library to the mathematician seeking proof of every statement. I sit somewhere in the middle, but more towards the mathematical end. I subscribe to the traditional statistician's view of Machine Learning. It is a term invented in order to avoid having to prove theorems and dodge the rigors of 'real' statistics. However, I strongly support such a course of action. There is an immense need for Machine Learning algorithms, whether they have actual properties or not, and an equal need for books to introduce these topics to people like myself who have a strong mathematical background, but have not been exposed to these techniques.

Hastie & Tibshirani has the most post-it's of any book on my shelf. When my company built an custom multivariate statistical library for our targeted product, we largely followed Hastie & Tibshirani's taxonomy. Their overview of support vector machines is excellent, and I found little of value to me in dedicated volumes like Cristianini & Shawe-Taylor that wasn't covered in Hastie & Tibshirani. Hastie & Tibshirani is another book with excellent visual aides. In addition to some great 2-D representations of complex multidimensional spaces, I thought the 'car going up hill' icon was a very useful cue that the level was going up a notch.

Having praised this book, I can't argue with any of the negative reviews. There is no right answer of where to start or what to cover. This book will be too mathematical for some, insufficiently rigorous for others, but was just right for me. It will offer too much of a hodge-podge of techniques, miss someone's favorite, or offer just the right balance. In the end, it was the best one for me, so if you're like me (someone with a very solid math base, not a mathematician, who appreciates rigor, but isn't married to it, and who is looking to self-start on this topic.) you'll like it.

I have three texts in machine learning (Duda et. al, Bishop, and this one), and I can unequivocally say that, in my judgement, if you're looking to learn the key concepts of machine learning, this one is by far the worst of the three. Quite simply, it reads almost as a research monologue, only with less explanation and far less coherence. There's little/no attempt to demystify concepts to the newcomer, and the exposition is all over the map. There simply isn't a clear, coherent path that the authors set out to go on in writing a given chapter of this text; it's as if they tried to squeeze every bit of information of the most recent results into the chapter, with little regard to what such a decision might do to the overall readability of the text and the newcomer's understanding. To people who might disagree with me on this point, I'd recommend reading a chapter in Bishop's text and comparing it to similar content in this one, and I think you'll at least better appreciate my viewpoint, if not agree with it.

So you might be wondering, why do I even own the text given my opinion? Well, two reasons: (1) it cost 25 dollars through Springer and a contract they have with my university (definitely look into this before buying on Amazon!), and (2) if you actually already know the concepts, it is quite useful as a summary of what's out there. So to those who understand the basics of machine learning, and also have exposure to greedy algorithms, convex optimization, wavelets, and some other often-utilized methods in the text, this makes for a pretty good reference.

The authors are definitely very well-known researchers in the field, who in particular have written some good papers on a variety of machine learning topics (l1-norm penalized regression, analysis of boosting, to name just two), and thus this book naturally will attract some buzz. It may be very useful to someone like myself who is already familiar with much of what's in the book, or someone who is an expert in the field and just uses it as a quick reference. As a pedagogical tool, however, I think it's pretty much a disaster, and feel compelled to write this as to prevent the typical buyer -- who undoubtedly is buying it to learn and not to use as a reference -- from wasting a lot of money on the wrong text.

The review from September 8 expresses an opinion which is the exact opposite of mine, and is worded so strongly that I have to object. I gave a course using the book to bioinformaticians, most of them with a computer science background, and found the book exceptionally well prepared and suitable for a graduate course. The book serves the dual purpose of an introduction and a reference. An especially nice feature is how the authors explain the relationships and differences between different methods. By doing so, they provide context which I have not seen in any other book on this subject. The book is a very nice combination of basic theory and performance evaluation on data from a wide variety of domains and it is quite up-to-date. It has a well developed website going with it and the graphical material can be obtained electronically from the publisher. The book is an outstanding contribution to the field.

i really like this book. i haven't finished reading yet. it's extremely dense. by that, i mean every page, every paragraph is packed full of information. it makes for slow but very rewarding reading. i bought the book because

i wanted to learn something about the topic. i've got a math and statistics background, but i haven't dealt with the broad topic of data mining or statistical learning. the book suits my needs very very well.

it's clearly written. i haven't found any grammatical or technical errors. it's pacing is ambitious, but i find i can follow it. i do think some math and statistics background is required to make the book readable and useful.

i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone with the appropriate background.