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I found a Great Free Machine Learning Book!
Book vs Video Lectures
In today’s digital age, there is a wealth of information available online, including video lectures and tutorials on a wide variety of subjects. While these resources can be incredibly valuable, they may not be the best choice for everyone. For many people, reading a book on a subject can be a more effective way to learn.
I personally prefer reading books over watching video lecture due to the following reasons:
- Books allow me to pause, rewind, and review information as needed, ensuring that I fully understand the material before moving on.
- Reading a book allows me to deeply engage with the material. When reading, I can underline, make notes, and even ask questions in the margin.
- Another advantage of reading a book is the fact that most books have been thoroughly reviewed and edited before being published, which means that the material is more likely to be accurate and well-written, which might not be the case with video lectures.
The Book
Today, I will talk about one of the books that I read recently- Machine Learning Simplified: A Gentle Introduction to Supervised Learning (themlsbook.com). I ran into this book when I was looking for some interesting ways of explaining ML concepts intuitively to my students. I was impressed by the book and since it was free, I decided to share it here with a short review.
Here are three main highlights I noted when skimming through it:
1. Intuitive Explanations
This book gives a pretty good intuition into the inner workings of ML. I really liked how the first chapters explain the foundation of a ML algorithm by providing a clear step-by-step explanation of gradient descent with a simple example. The best part is, it democratizes all mathematics involved and I personally found it easy to follow. I also enjoyed the explanation of decision trees, particularly the mathematical breakdown of Gini score and Entropy. The use of a clear example made it ridiculously simple to understand…
