How do you become a machine learning wizard? 🧙♂️
Study!
These 3 free books can be your wand, hat, and cauldron.
Pick them up entirely free(!) or as a nice hardbound for the shelf for your step into ML research.
Deep Learning Book
by Ian Goodfellow
This is the book I learned neural networks from scratch with!
This book has three main chapters from ML basics, to neural networks, to ML research.
This will look nice on a shelf
There is also a free online version of the deep learning book.
(Me as a broke student appreciated that a bunch…)
Elements of Statistical Learning
by Trevor Hastie
This is the classic.
When people ask me about the statistics of machine learning, I point them to this book. But don’t be fooled. It has great illustrations and structure that make it very accessible.
Elements of statistics is also available free in all its 12 glorious versions.
Probabilistic Machine Learning
by Kevin Patrick Murphy
Machine learning is often seen as frequentist statistics.
This book aims to provide a Bayesian lense to classic ML algorithms and modern techniques like transfer learning.
This one has a draft version available for free.
Conclusion
For your ML study, observe these books three:
- Deep Learning Book
- Elements of Statistical Learning
- Probabilistic Machine Learning
Filled to the brim with knowledge that’ll get you very far.