Pattern Classification (Pt.1) [Hardcover]

Richard O. Duda (Author), Peter E. Hart (Author), David G. Stork (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0471056693 | ISBN-13: 978-0471056690 | Edition: 2

The first edition, published in 1973, has become a classic reference in the field. Now with the second edition, readers will find information on key new topics such as neural networks and statistical pattern recognition, the theory of machine learning, and the theory of invariances. Also included are worked examples, comparisons between different methods, extensive graphics, expanded exercises and computer project topics.

An Instructor's Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available from the Wiley editorial department.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"…it provides a good introduction to the subject of Pattern Classification." (Journal of Classification, September 2007)

"…a fantastic book! The presentation...could not be better, and I recommend that future authors consider…this book as a role model." (Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, March 2006)

"...strongly recommended both as a professional reference and as a text for students..." (Technometrics, February 2002)

"...provides information needed to choose the most appropriate of the many available technique for a given class of problems." (SciTech Book News, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2001)

"I do not believe anybody wishing to teach or do serious work on Pattern Recognition can ignore this book, as it is the sort of book one wishes to find the time to read from cover to cover!" (Pattern Analysis & Applications Journal, 2001)

"This book is the unique text/professional reference for any serious student or worker in the field of pattern recognition." (Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2001k)

"...gives a systematic overview about the major topics in pattern recognition, based whenever possible on fundamental principles." (Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 968, 2001/18)

"attractively presented and readable" (Journal of Classification, Vol.18, No.2 2001)

From the Back Cover

From the reviews . . .

"The first edition of this book, published 30 years ago by Duda and Hart, has been a defining book for the field of Pattern Recognition. Stork has done a superb job of updating the book. He has undertaken a monumental task of sifting through 30 years of material in a rapidly growing field and presented another snapshot of the field, determining what will be of importance for the next 30 years and incorporating it into this second edition. The style is easy to read as in the original book and the statistical, mathematical material comes alive with many new illustrations. The end result is harmonious, leading the reader through many new topics..."
–Sargur N. Srihari, PhD, Director, Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition, Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SUNY at Buffalo

Practitioners developing or investigating pattern recognition systems in such diverse application areas as speech recognition, optical character recognition, image processing, or signal analysis, often face the difficult task of having to decide among a bewildering array of available techniques. This unique text/professional reference provides the information you need to choose the most appropriate method for a given class of problems, presenting an in-depth, systematic account of the major topics in pattern recognition today. A new edition of a classic work that helped define the field for over a quarter century, this practical book updates and expands the original work, focusing on pattern classification and the immense progress it has experienced in recent years. Special features include:

• Clear explanations of both classical and new methods, including neural networks, stochastic methods, genetic algorithms, and theory of learning
• Over 350 high-quality, two-color illustrations highlighting various concepts
• Numerous worked examples
• Pseudocode for pattern recognition algorithms
• Expanded problems, keyed specifically to the text
• Complete exercises, linked to the text
• Algorithms to explain specific pattern-recognition and learning techniques
• Historical remarks and important references at the end of chapters
• Appendices covering the necessary mathematical background

NOTE: Computer Manual in MATLAB to Accompany Pattern Classification, 2e users access toolbox via ftp://ftp.wiley.com/public/sci_tech_med/pattern_classification/ (Note: Visitors will require a password from the Manual to access.)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 680 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Interscience; 2 edition (November 9, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471056693
• ISBN-13: 978-0471056690
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.2 x 10.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Algorithms > Pattern Recognition

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 59 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing December 27, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

This book is a revised edition of Duda and Hart's classic text on Pattern Classification which was originally published in 1973. In fact, the 1973 edition of the book played a pivotal role in introducing me (and countless researchers of my generation) to the field of pattern classification. Needless to say, I was looking forward to the release of the revised edition. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed with the new edition. I had expected much more from the masters: Duda and Hart!

My reasons for disappointment with this book are as follows:

Given the 27 years that have elapsed since the publication of the first edition of the book, and the immense progress that has taken place in pattern recognition, machine learning, computational learning theory, grammar inference, statistical inference, algorithmic information theory, and related areas, the revisions and additions in the 2000 edition are essentially of a patchwork nature. In my opinion, they do not reflect the current understanding of the topic of pattern classification.

A disproportionate number of pages are devoted to topics like density estimation despite the fact that it has been well established in recent years, through the work of Vapnik and others, that when working with limited data, trying to solve the problem of pattern classification through density estimation (which turns out to be, in a well-defined sense of the term, a much harder problem than pattern classification) is rather futile. When modern techniques for learning pattern classifiers from limited data sets (e.g., support vector classifiers) are touched on in the book, the treatment is disappointingly superficial and in some cases, misleading....

There is virtually no discussion of problems of learning from large high dimensional data sets, incremental refinement of classifiers, learning from sequential data, distributed algorithms, etc. The treatment of non-numeric pattern recognition techniques (e.g., automata, languages, etc.) is extremely superficial. There is almost no discussion of essential aspects such as preprocessing and feature extraction techniques for dealing with variable length, semistructured, or unstructured patterns.

There is very little contact made with a large body of pattern classification algorithms, results, and approaches developed by the machine learning community, some exceptions.

There is little discussion of the extremely important topic of computational complexity and data requirements of learning algorithms.

On the positive side, the discussion of most topics that were originally covered in the 1973 edition has been further refined and in many cases, made more accessible through the addition of illustrative examples and diagrams. Topics such as Bayesian networks receive an intutive and accessible treatment. It was good to see a treatment of techniques for combining classifiers (although it is placed misleadingly in a chapter titled "Algorithm-Independent Machine Learning" which has an organization that is reminescent of a "kitchen sink"). The exercises at the end of each chapter seems useful.

Perhaps it is too difficult for any individual or a small group of individuals to write a textbook that reflects the state of the art in pattern recognition. Perhaps my expectations of Duda and Hart (based largely on the extraordinary job that did on the 1973 edition of their book) were too high to have a reasonable chance of being met by the 2000 edition. Perhaps I have come to expect more out of graduate level textbooks after having worked as a researcher and an educator in this field for over a decade at a major university.

In short, the book fell significantly short of my expectation. Read more ›

84 of 88 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pattern Classification by Duda et al.--2nd Edition December 28, 2000

By Lyndon S Hibbard

Format:Hardcover

The 1973 edition of Pattern Classification by Richard Duda and Peter Hart is one of the most cited books in the fields of image processing, machine vision, and classification. It contains perhaps the clearest, most comprehensible descriptions of statistical inference ever written. Though intended for the image processing audience, it is general in its approach, and is broader in coverage than other contemporary books like the redoubtable Van Trees (1969). The section on Bayesian Learning anticipates the EM algorithm which appeared a few years later (Dempster, et al. 1977) and their description of Parzen windows for density estimation is more often cited than Parzen's own papers.

The appearance of the 2000 2nd edition led this writer to wonder if D&H could repeat with an offering as good as their first. In particular, would D&H have kept up with the considerable growth in methodology in the 1990s? Well, they have! With the addition of David Stork as third author, the second addition re-presents the basic theory, illustrated with some beautiful and complex figures, and knits it neatly with an exposition of neural networks, stochastic methods for posterior determination, nonmetric classification (tree search and string parsing), and clustering. Chapter 9 is a particularly interesting review of the recent machine learning research making the point that, absent knowledge of a problem's specific domain, no one classifier is better that any other. This chapter also reviews solutions to the problem of training on too-small samples including the Jackknife and bootstrap methods, and newer bagging and boosting algorithms popular in data mining applications.... Each chapter is well-designed, with a summary, many exercises (including computer exercises), and references to the literature (typically 50-100) including many recent references.

This book is designed for an upper-level undergraduate/graduate audience. It doesn't assume a knowledge of statistics, but requires some familiarity with methods from calculus, real analysis, and linear algebra.

The first edition was a particularly important element in this writer's education; the second edition is certain to find a similar place in the working and intellectual lives of many new readers. Read more ›

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent revision of a classical text on statistical pattern recognition January 23, 2008

By Michael R. Chernick

Format:Hardcover

The 1973 book by Duda and Hart was a classic. It surveyed the literature on pattern classification and scene analysis and provided the practitioner with wonderful insight and exposition of the subject. In the intervening 28 years the field has exploded and there has been an enormous increase in technical approaches and applications.
With this in mind the authors and their new coauthor David Stork go about the task of providing a revision. True to the goals of the original the authors undertake to describe pattern recognition under a variety of topics and with several available methods to cover each topic. Important new areas are covered and old but now deemed less significant are dropped. Advances in statistical computing and computing in general also dictate the topics. So although the authors are the same and the title is almost the same (note that scene analysis is dropped from the title) it is more like an entirely new book on the subject rthan a revision of the old. For a revision, I would expect to see mostly the same chapters with the same titles and only a few new chapters along with expansion of old chapters.

Although I view this as a new book, that is not necessarily bad. In fact it may be viewed as a strength of the book. It maintains the style and clarity of the original that we all loved but represents the state-of-the-art in pattern recognition at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The original had some very nice pictures. I liked some of them so much that I used them with permission in the section on classification error rate estimation in my bootstrap book. This edition goes much further with beautiful graphics including many nice three-dimensional color pictures like the one on the cover page....

The standard classical material is covered in the first five chapters with new material included (e.g. the EM algorithm and hidden markov models in Chapter 3). Chapter 6 covers multilayer neural networks (a totally new area). Nonmetric methods including decision trees and the CART methodology are covered in Chapter 8. Each chapter has a large number of relevant references and many homework exercises and computer exercises.

Chapter 9 is "Algorithm-Independent Machine Learning" and it includes the wonderful "No Free Lunch" theorem (Theorem 9.1), a discussion of the minimum desciption length principle, overfitting issues and Occam's razor, bias - variance tradeoffs,resampling method for estimation and classifier evaluation, and ideas about combining classifiers.

Chapter 10 is on unsurpervised learning and clustering. In addition to the traditional techniques covered in the first edition the authors include the many advances in mixture models.

I was particularly interested in that part of Chapter 9. There is good coverage of the topics and they provide a number of good references. However, I was a bit disappointed with the cursory treatment of bootstrap estimation of classification accuracy (section 9.6.3 on pages 485 - 486). I particularly disagree with the simplistic statement "In practice, the high computational complexity of bootstrap estimation of classifier accuracy is rarely worth possible improvements in that estimate (Section 9.5.1)". On the other hand, the book is one of the first to cover the newer and also promising resampling approaches called "Bagging" and "Boosting" that these authors seem to favor.

Davison and Hinkley's bootstrap text is mentioned for its practical applications and guidance for bootstrapping. The authors overlook Shao and Tu which offers more in the way of guidance. Also my book provides some guidance for error rate estimation but is overlooked.

My book also illustrate the limitations of the bootstrap. Phil Good's book provides guidance and is mentioned by the authors. But his book is very superficial and overgeneralized with respect to guiding practitioners. For these reasons I held back my enthusiasm and only gave this text four stars. Read more ›