An Introduction to Machine Learning

This book presents basic ideas of machine learning in a way that is easy to understand, by providing hands-on practical advice, using simple examples, and motivating students with discussions of interesting applications. The main topics include Bayesian classifiers, nearest-neighbor classifiers, linear and polynomial classifiers, decision trees, neural networks, and support vector machines. Later chapters show how to combine these simple tools by way of "e;boosting,"e; how to exploit them in more complicated domains, and how to deal with diverse advanced practical issues. One chapter is dedicated to the popular genetic algorithms.