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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I just happened to read the reviews on the book on Support vector machines by Nello Cristianini and John Shawe-Taylor. Could not resist adding my own comments about the book. Excellent book. I plan to use the book for the course on "Fundamentals of computer aided engineering" that I teach at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I just happened to read the reviews on the book on Support vector machines by Nello Cristianini and John Shawe-Taylor. Could not resist adding my own comments about the book. Excellent book. I plan to use the book for the course on "Fundamentals of computer aided engineering" that I teach at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).
Rating:
Summary: Cogent and Coherent
Review: I used to believe that the thicker the book, the greater the chance that I'd be able to learn something from it. This book by Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor is the complete opposite.The book is clear and concise in it's development of the theory of SVMs, and is thorough in going through all relevant background material. Particularly useful is the section optimisation which is usually missing from statistical and computer science backgrounds. Beware that this book is not for the mathematically shy. If you want to learn about SVMs and don't mind getting your teeth stuck into some serious (applied) maths, then this book is for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Not even close to an intro...
Review: Oh Puhleeeezzzzz... How is your vector math??? Remeber your linear algebra well? Do you have a background in SVM's? Intuitively able to suck out of thin air the meaning of the Gamma co-efficient as applied to svm's?? You've read all the background papers and remember your formal logic???? No?? too bad..your out of luck.. This book is more aptly titled an Introduction to the Formalisms of SVM's. If your a software engineer trying to implement one of these, forget it.. Be nice if they put that quadratic algorthim psuedocode into something more readable than greek symbology.. If you are trying to build one of these engines, then this book is of absolutely no help, unless you have a background in machine learning and have read all the papers on SVM's. If you can decompose the math into code in your head, then you might find it entertaining... What I don't get is how all the rest of these reviewers can give such "glowing praise" for this book and have it be so completely worthless as an introduction... makes me think some of these are shills.. Bottom line is, if your trying to code a svm, this book will not help. If your trying to understand how to implement a svm, this book will not help. If you are trying to understand how an svm works, this book will not help. If you want to know the mathematical basis for SVM's and like that presentation.. this is the book for you..
Rating:
Summary: Not even close to an intro...
Review: Oh Puhleeeezzzzz... How is your vector math??? Remember your linear algebra well? Do you have a background in SVM's? Intuitively able to suck out of thin air the meaning of the Gamma co-efficient as applied to svm's?? You've read all the background papers and remember your formal logic???? No?? too bad..your out of luck..
This book is more aptly titled an Introduction to the Formalisms of SVM's. If your a software engineer trying to implement one of these, forget it.. Be nice if they put that quadratic algorthim psuedocode into something more readable than greek symbology..
If you are trying to build one of these engines, then this book is of absolutely no help, unless you have a background in machine learning and have read all the papers on SVM's. If you can decompose the math into code in your head, then you might find it entertaining... What I don't get is how all the rest of these reviewers can give such "glowing praise" for this book and have it be so completely worthless as an introduction... makes me think some of these are shills..
Bottom line is, if your trying to code a svm, this book will not help. If your trying to understand how to implement a svm, this book will not help. If you are trying to understand how an svm works, this book will not help. If you want to know the mathematical basis for SVM's and like that presentation.. this is the book for you..
Rating:
Summary: This is it !
Review: The book is just great. The appendix on algorithms could have more explanations. Also the application section is a short. It would have been more usuful to take one of these applicaitons and describe it in details. But all in all, the book is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful book to learn support vector machines
Review: This is a first book introducing support vector learning, a very hot area in machine learning, data mining, and statistics. Aside from Burges (1998)'s tutorial article and Vapnik (1995)'s book, this book by two authors actively working in this field is a welcome addition which is likely to become a standard reference and a textbook among students and researchers who want to learn this important subject. Besides tutoring systematically on the standard theory such as large margin hyperplane, nonlinear kernel classifiers, and support vector regression, this book also deals with growing new areas in this field such as random processes. More interestingly, this book discusses a lot of applications which I consider very imoportant and healthy for the advance of this field, such as medical diagnosis, image analysis, and bioinformatics. In all, I strongly recommend this book for students, and young researchers who want to learn. I'm sure a lot of people will find this book a wise investment, since it provides a handy and timely review of a rapidly growing field.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful book to learn support vector machines
Review: This is a first book introducing support vector learning, a very hot area in machine learning, data mining, and statistics. Aside from Burges (1998)'s tutorial article and Vapnik (1995)'s book, this book by two authors actively working in this field is a welcome addition which is likely to become a standard reference and a textbook among students and researchers who want to learn this important subject. Besides tutoring systematically on the standard theory such as large margin hyperplane, nonlinear kernel classifiers, and support vector regression, this book also deals with growing new areas in this field such as random processes. More interestingly, this book discusses a lot of applications which I consider very imoportant and healthy for the advance of this field, such as medical diagnosis, image analysis, and bioinformatics. In all, I strongly recommend this book for students, and young researchers who want to learn. I'm sure a lot of people will find this book a wise investment, since it provides a handy and timely review of a rapidly growing field.
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