Computer Systems That Learn: Classification and Prediction Methods from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert Systems (Machine Learning Series)

Rating:
Summary: Still the best intro to nonparametric modeling
Review: This book gives a good cohesive introduction to the basic algorithms, including Nearest Neighbor, Decision Trees, Bayesian Networks, and Neural Networks. Most other books are biased by the author's bent of Statistics, Machine Learning or Pattern Recognition.

The main value of the book however is its coverage of techniques that 1) estimate a model's accuracy, and 2) select a 'good' model. This book offers the reader a solid foundation to what we are trying to achieve: to get at the objective truth.