The Elements Of Statistical Learning. Data Mining, Inference, And Prediction

During the past decade, there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support machines, classification trees, and boosting - the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book.