Hacker News Reader

An amazing text on this topic is Martin Wainwright/Michael Jordan's Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and Variational Inference: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/Papers/WaiJor08_F...

Thanks for sharing. Somehow I find a lot of Computer Science texts published under the "Foundations and Trends" model of very high quality.

wow ! thank you :) this should be required reading/prereq, ideally, before taking the PGM course offered via coursera.

This is more of a graduate-level text though. It's as close as you can currently get to Michael Jordan's forthcoming book on graphical models and ML.

Is this the book that's been in development for the past decade with bits and pieces available online?

That's the one :)