The StatQuest Illustrated Guide To Machine Learning

Simple explanations of complex mathematical principles and a great complement to the You Tube videos

I got this book because I'm a fan of Josh's YouTube channel. He has a knack for explaining things well in a funny way, by using visuals, jokes, and helping see the intuition behind things.This book is in a similar style. It is driven by diagrams and funny cartoons, plus jokes that made me LOL a few times (like "SoftPlus" sounding like a toilet paper brand, and mentions of Troll 2).The book is mainly from a stats perspective: Josh helps you see modelling as fitting data (but not overfitting it), even in the case of neural networks.What does it actually cover? Some of the most important models in ML: linear models, logistic regression, SVMs, decision trees, Naive Bayes and neural networks.On top of that, Josh discusses stats and ML fundamentals and how to evaluate and adjust models: which includes cross-validation and gradient descent. Appendices have a quick intro to some of the other math topics (like calculating derivatives).Where this book really shines is in bringing home a good intuition of how ML actually works, thanks to the clear explanations and detailed diagrams. There is a focus on the "big ideas" instead of getting lost in the minutiae while not shying away from the math. It also shows repeated themes and tools used in the field (e.g. minimising a loss function and gradient descent).In summary, I think this book is great whether you are someone starting to learn about ML or even if you have more experience and want a nice refresher of the fundamentals in a quirky way.

Makes complex maths so simple and straightforward. A huge compliment to the YouTube videos

Amazing book. It does not oversimplify concepts, and uses the right terminology, but the explanations are so straight to the point and visual that it is impossible not to understand everything that's been explained. I bought it mainly because I have been following statquest videos in YouTube forever and they have taught me more than my own PhD courses have. The fact that the explanations are visual is a tremendous help for us visual learners. 10 out of 10. I will be purchasing the CNN one next month.

I wish Josh could write graphic books on every aspect of life that are clearly explained like this one. I will buy them all!!!

Theres is not much literaure around which explains difficult stuff like neural networks but this BAM stuff (when it takes up a whole page!) gets a bit irritating.I really appreciate the authors attempt to simplify things but he overdoes it a bit i think! dinosuars and stuff are distracting . Trying to avoid unavoidable math eg classic chain rule makes it hard as well - i teach that stuff and found it confusing ! :-) Dont get me wrong - a good atempt and probably the best around. A good start esp in conjuction with your very nice videos. Thanks!!

Arrived on time in excellent condition

I started reading this today. About 50 pages in an I'm impressed. It's written in such a concise, digestible manner whilst still maintaining a good degree of detail. The colours are pleasing to the eye and definitely help maintain your attention without being a distraction. My only criticism is I wish there was a hardback option available. I'm a PhD but also teach so would have loved to have been able to use this with my students as I often get questions about ML. I just don't feel comfortable taking this into the classroom as the backing feels a bit delicate compared to other paperbacks.