The Best-Selling Learning Algorithms Books of All Time

A thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of machine learning and the race to build computer intelligences as flexible as our own. In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone.

He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

Emphasizing issues of computational efficiency, Michael Kearns and Umesh Vazirani introduce a number of central topics in computational learning theory for researchers and students in artificial intelligence, neural networks, theoretical computer science, and statistics.Emphasizing issues of computational efficiency, Michael Kearns and Umesh Vazirani introduce a number of central topics in computational learning theory for researchers and students in artificial intelligence, neural networks, theoretical computer science, and statistics.

Computational learning theory is a new and rapidly expanding area of research that examines formal models of induction with the goals of discovering the common methods underlying efficient learning algorithms and identifying the computational impediments to learning. Each topic in the book has been chosen to elucidate a general principle, which is explored in a precise formal setting. Intuition has been emphasized in the presentation to make the material accessible to the nontheoretician while still providing precise arguments for the specialist. This balance is the result of new proofs of established theorems, and new presentations of the standard proofs. The topics covered include the motivation, definitions, and fundamental results, both positive and negative, for the widely studied L. G. Valiant model of Probably Approximately Correct Learning; Occam's Razor, which formalizes a relationship between learning and data compression; the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension; the equivalence of weak and strong learning; efficient learning in the presence of noise by the method of statistical queries; relationships between learning and cryptography, and the resulting computational limitations on efficient learning; reducibility between learning problems; and algorithms for learning finite automata from active experimentation.

Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment.

In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability. The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.