The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition

There is no other book I know of in this space with the same combination of thorough detailed math, intuition, application to real-world data, and excellent graphics. It's also very well-written. Their notation can be a bit weird, but whatever. Maybe I'm weird for finding their notation weird.Enough praise. Just buy it and study it. I personally like it better than the comparable books by Barber, Bishop, Murphy, and others, but to each their own. These three are excellent books in their own right, and maybe some would prefer them, especially if one does a lot of Bayesian modeling. But usually, one doesn't. And if you're a beginner in machine learning, my opinion is that studying Bayesian inference as a default can be confusing.Reading advice, if you're not a mathematician (if you are, you don't need my advice): I highly recommend going through a book on standard statistical inference first, else you might be a bit lost, and subtle points that Hastie et al make might be missed (I often pick up details on a second reading - lots of "aha" moments to be had). Not to mention the fact that some of their derivations will seem impenetrable; that one for bias and variance of the linear model in chapter 2 nonplussed me for a while. Luckily there are the accompanying notes by Weatherwax et al (google it), which are seriously helpful.Good options for background are Casella & Berger (the standard), the book "Statistical rethinking from scratch" by Edge (such a good book!), the book "Probability and mathematical statistics" by Meyer (this looks excellent but I don't know it well), and many others (the number of books written on statistical inference asymptotically approaches infinity). Some people like the book by Wasserman but I find it so "skeletal" (as one reviewer said) that one has to go elsewhere for the details anyway. So why not just read a less skeletal book?Anyway, back to ESL. Reading this has made me a less dumb person, even though I've only read in detail the first 3 chapters. I hope it will do the same for you.

I have been using The Elements of Statistical Learning for years, so it is finally time to try and review it.The Elements of Statistical Learning is a comprehensive mathematical treatment of machine learning from a statistical perspective. This means you get good derivations of popular methods such as support vector machines, random forests, and graphical models; but each is developed only after the appropriate (and wrongly considered less sexy) statistical framework has already been derived (linear models, kernel smoothing, ensembles, and so on).In addition to having excellent and correct mathematical derivations of important algorithms The Elements of Statistical Learning is fairly unique in that it actually uses the math to accomplish big things. My favorite examples come from Chapter 3 "Linear Methods for Regression." The standard treatments of these methods depend heavily on respectful memorization of regurgitation of original iterative procedure definitions of the various regression methods. In such a standard formulation two regression methods are different if they have superficially different steps or if different citation/priority histories. The Elements of Statistical Learning instead derives the stopping conditions of each method and considers methods the same if they generate the same solution (regardless of how they claim they do it) and compares consequences and results of different methods. This hard use of isomorphism allows amazing results such as Figure 3.15 (which shows how Least Angle Regression differs from Lasso regression, not just in algorithm description or history: but by picking different models from the same data) and section 3.5.2 (which can separate Partial Least Squares' design CLAIM of fixing the x-dominance found in principle components analysis from how effective it actually is as fixing such problems).The biggest issue is who is the book for? This is a mathy book emphasizing deep understanding over mere implementation. Unlike some lesser machine learning books the math is not there for appearances or mere intimidating typesetting: it is there to allow the authors to organize many methods into a smaller number of consistent themes. So I would say the book is for researchers and machine algorithm developers. If you have a specific issue that is making inference difficult you may find the solution in this book. This is good for researchers but probably off-putting for tinkers (as this book likely has methods superior to their current favorite new idea). The interested student will also benefit from this book, the derivations are done well so you learn a lot by working through them.Finally- don't buy the kindle version, but the print book. This book is satisfying deep reading and you will want the advantages of the printed page (and Amazon's issues in conversion are certainly not the authors' fault).