Machine Learning [Hardcover]

When describing a field of knowledge, it's important to communicate the "Big Picture." Mitchell does a poor job of this. That is to say that he doesn't do this at all. The lack of a pervasive thread is all the more odd and disconcerting given that his dissertation gave an amazingly coherent description of the process of inductive learning. I suppose I feel a bit taken because there's nothing so tangible or real to hold the disjoint chapters together. So, without any real historical or philosophical context, we're left with something reminiscent of a first-year calculus book. Here's how to differentiate, here's how to integrate, now go figure out what you're supposed to do with those things.

Nevertheless, anyone needing a reference guide (think of a shop manual) to machine learning techniques (that isn't quite up to date) would do well to buy this book. Anyone wanting to understand the field of machine learning should probably check out a bit of the competition. I think you'll find that some folks' kung fu is stronger.

The book sorely needs an update, it was written in 1997 and the field has moved fast. A comparison with Mitchell's current course (materials generously available online) shows that about 1/4 of the topics taught have arisen since the book was published; Boosting, Support Vector Machines and Hidden Markov Models to name the best-known. The book also does not cover statistical or data mining methods.

Despite the subjective complaint about lack of depth it does give the theoretical roots and many fundamental techniques decently and readably. For many purposes though it may have been superceded by R&N 2nd ed.