Benjamin Recht

Moritz Hardt

Foundations of Machine Learning

Patterns, Predictions, and Actions

An authoritative, up-to-date graduate textbook on machine learning that highlights its historical context and societal impacts Patterns, Predictions, and Actions introduces graduate students to the essentials of machine learning while offering invaluable perspective on its history and social implications. Beginning with the foundations of decision making, Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht explain how representation, optimization, and generalization are the constituents of supervised learning. They go on to provide self-contained discussions of causality, the practice of causal inference, sequential decision making, and reinforcement learning, equipping readers with the concepts and tools they need to assess the consequences that may arise from acting on statistical decisions. Provides a modern introduction to machine learning, showing how data patterns support predictions and consequential actions Pays special attention to societal impacts and fairness in decision making Traces the development of machine learning from its origins to today Features a novel chapter on machine learning benchmarks and datasets Invites readers from all backgrounds, requiring some experience with probability, calculus, and linear algebra An essential textbook for students and a guide for researchers

Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment.

How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us

The Irrational Decision

Stephen J. Wright

"Optimization formulations and algorithms have long played a central role in data analysis and machine learning. Maximum likelihood concepts date to Gauss and Laplace in the late 1700s; problems of this type drove developments in unconstrained optimization in the latter half of the 20th century. Mangasarian's papers in the 1960s on pattern separation using linear programming made an explicit connection between machine learning and optimization in the early days of the former subject. During the 1990s, optimization techniques (especially quadratic programming and duality) were key to the development of support vector machines and kernel learning. The period 1997-2010 saw many synergies emerge between regularized / sparse optimization, variable selection, and compressed sensing. In the current era of deep learning, two optimization techniques-stochastic gradient and automatic differentiation (a.k.a. back-propagation)-are essential"--

Benjamin Recht

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