There is a new book out titled 'Machine learning for hackers' from the publishing house O'Reilly.
I have written a review which is now live on Amazon.
One line summary: 5-stars if you already know some R.
I will be using some of the machine learning techniques in the forthcoming series of posts. Since this is a vast field, there is always that nagging feeling at the back of your mind that maybe what you are doing is naive and not at all what the guru data miners will do. Maybe there is some complex technique that can bypass all the grunt work of data scraping / cleaning / plotting and just transform the data into some n-dimensional space where the problem is trivially solved :)
The book served as a morale boosting benchmark. Authors are well known bloggers in R community. It is reassuring to learn that every traveler to machine learning promised land has to muddle through the messy swamp of unclean data and foggy relationships.
