Description

This book is a general introduction to machine learning that can serve as a textbook for students and researchers in the field. It covers fundamental modern topics in machine learning while providing the theoretical basis and conceptual tools needed for the discussion and justification of algorithms. It also describes several key aspects of the application of these algorithms.
We have aimed to present the most novel theoretical tools and concepts while giving concise proofs, even for relatively advanced results. In general, whenever possible, we have chosen to favor succinctness. Nevertheless, we discuss some crucial complex topics arising in machine learning and highlight several open research questions. Certain topics often merged with others or treated with insufficient attention are discussed separately here and with more emphasis: for example, a different chapter is reserved for multi-class classification, ranking, and regression. Although we cover a very wide variety of important topics in machine learning, we have chosen to omit a few important ones, including graphical models and neural
networks, both for the sake of brevity and because of the current lack of solid theoretical guarantees for some methods.