Customer Reviews

Netlab

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i first bought the book by Bishop (Neural Network for Pattern Recognition) and anyone who have read it can tell u how excellent that book is. This book has a little bit less theory and more on implementation which is perfect for me. This book include all the topics covered in Bishop and then some. How the book is organized, and how concise, easy to understand the material is at the same amazing level as Bishop's. I believe implementing and practicing things u learn is key to understanding them.. if you just look at how things are implemented, things would suddenly become 10 times clearer for you.. often to your own amazement (that you can actually understand all those stuff). this book is extremely useful even if u dont have matlab (just look up the syntax at mathworks web site), cuz matlab code is straightforward to understand. and the material included is very up to date and cutting edge indeed. i highly highly recommend it.

Any praise that I have for this well written, interesting book has already been expressed in other reviews. I do have a couple of observations that may be helpful:

1) This book does not explictly cover everything in Chris Bishop's book. For instance, code for the optimal brain surgeon technique is not covered by Nabney. In fact, several important topics from Chapters 8 and 9 from Bishop are not covered here.

2) Not all of the Matlab code is compatable with Octave, which of course, it doesn't claim to be.

These are not complaints. This is one of the best books on "how to apply software" I've yet to read. But it's not a just a book on algorithms to which it's consise, well placed discussions of theory will attest.

Amazingly compact book and MATLAB toolbox that provides an exceptionally clear introduction to a core collection of pattern recognition tools. This text and the related MATLAB toolbox ostensibly accompany Chris Bishop's text _Neural networks for pattern recognition_ and brilliant as that book is, this is the perfect supplement that does so much more than just implement the algorithms (and not just for MATLAB users but for anyone who appreciates the merits of learning by doing). From the introductory chapters on MATLAB syntax and optimization (clearer and more useful than the _Numerical Recipes_ version) you know you are in for a breathless ride but the examples and demos are perfectly chosen to illustrate the relative merits of the different approaches under consideration.

The chapter titles are

1. Introduction
2. Parameter optimisation algorithms
3. Density modelling and clustering
4. Single layer networks
5. Multi-layer perceptron
6. Radial Basis functions
7. Visualization and latent variable models
8. Sampling
9. Bayesian techniques
10. Gaussian Processes

The MATLAB code is elegant and well-commented and lends itself to endless tweaking and experimentation. I wish I had written this book. Congratulations to the author and hope there is another book on the way.

Netlab implements in Matlab most algorithms presented in Christopher Bishop's excelent book Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition

Nabney's book is an indispensable guide if you want to go into the inner workings of Netlab.

Recommended.

the book is very good for research and sutudying persons because it has some code and clear expression on the content .

This is actually a must-have book for those who want to study pattern recognition.