Ask HN: Recommend a book on Machine Learning and/or Graph Theory? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommend a book on Machine Learning and/or Graph Theory?

21 pointsspxdcz8 comments

Hey HN'ers.

A couple of us are part-way through developing our next app (http://pageradius.com/), and the more we get into it, the deeper we're getting into machine learning and graph theory (including frequent itemsets, association rules, bayesian classification, clustering, and so on).

We've scoured the web for as much info as we can and are making pretty good progress, but really want to get stuck into a solid, well-edited book that explains these concepts clearly - we're really loving these subjects.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

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It isn't published yet, but you can get the early access (MEAP) of Machine Learning in Action from Manning:

http://www.manning.com/pharrington/

A good basic graph theory book is:

http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Graph-Theory-Gary-Chartra...

Depending on exactly what you're trying to do, you might also find some value in something like:

http://www.amazon.com/Network-Science-Applications-Ted-Lewis...

Disclaimer: I'm a total n00b on this topic.

I'm trying to learn how to classify items as related within a dataset. I know http://directedge.com does this (funded by yc, run by #wheels) so I had a look at their articles which are a helpful beginners intro. http://directededge.com/tech.html

In one of the articles #wheels recommends http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321

so I'm going to pick that one up but to be clear I really have no idea if this book addresses graph theory specifically; at this point anything and everything is helpful to me.

Hilary Mason's machine learning video is good:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920017493

It's more of a primer, but it seems like most of the other material assumes that you're already a practitioner. It does have enough depth to actually be somewhat proficient after watching it.

The Elements of Statistical Learning is pretty good. It's also available for free.

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

I realise somebody asked a similar question about Graph Theory books already - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865749 - but that discussion is two years old, and I was hoping there'd be something newer by now!

Also, I've found this free online (downloadable) book on Graph Theory to be really useful: http://code.google.com/p/graph-theory-algorithms-book/

For graph theory, I recommend Doug West's Introduction to Graph Theory. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Graph-Theory-Douglas-West... It's somewhat expensive, but worth the price. Also, Doug is a cool dude.

Whats missing on the list is interesting works of Jon Kleinberg. Hes CS professor at CMU checkout this link http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

I would suggest Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop.

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