Description

Machine learning is the latest in a long line of attempts to distill human knowledge and reasoning into a form that is suitable for constructing machines and engineering automated systems. As machine learning becomes more ubiquitous and its software packages become easier to use, it is natural and desirable that the low-level technical details are abstracted away
and hidden from the practitioner. However, this brings with it the danger that a practitioner becomes unaware of the design decisions and, hence, the limits of machine learning algorithms.
The enthusiastic practitioner who is interested to learn more about the magic behind successful machine learning algorithms currently faces a daunting set of pre-requisite knowledge:

Programming languages and data analysis tools
Large-scale computation and the associated frameworks
Mathematics and statistics and how machine learning builds on it

At universities, introductory courses on machine learning tend to spend early parts of the course covering some of these pre-requisites. For historical reasons, courses in machine learning tend to be taught in the computer science department, where students are often trained in the first two areas of knowledge, but not so much in mathematics and statistics.
Current machine learning textbooks primarily focus on machine learning algorithms and methodologies and assume that the reader is competent in mathematics and statistics. Therefore, these books only spend one or two chapters on background mathematics, either at the beginning of the book or as appendices. We have found many people who want to delve into the foundations of basic machine learning methods who struggle with the mathematical knowledge required to read a machine learning textbook. Having taught undergraduate and graduate courses at universities, we find that the gap between high school mathematics and the mathematics level required to read a standard machine learning textbook is too big for many people.