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Comment by egdamy | Hacker News Reader

Why not a book instead like the elements of statistical learning?

http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/download.htm...

Based on Amazon reviews recommending this book to a beginner is like recommending rudin to a high school junior that wants to learn calculus for the first time. Is there a better book?

Introduction to Statistical Learning? It's free and has an available MOOC http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Thanks for the link.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Statistical-Learning-Predict...

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Statistical-Learning-App...

The former seems to assume prior knowledge and the latter seems more beginner friendly, except it uses R (in case anyone wants the distinction).

These books assume some degree of Linear Algebra, ESL is definitely not for a entry level.

I would like to add www.codingthe matrix.com for any developers, which has a MOOC as well (Coursera), as a complement to Strang.

R is well worth learning if you're going to be doing any serious work with data. It's a weird-ass language, but it does data analysis/graphing/modelling really, really well.

I support this statement. Not a book for beginners, IMO

This is in no way appropriate for someone who is asking for math basics.

A lot of the material in this book makes much more sense having had experience coding machine learning algorithms.

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