This book describes established and advanced methods for reducing the dimensionality of numerical databases. Each description starts from intuitive ideas, develops the necessary mathematical details, and ends by outlining the algorithmic implementation. The text provides a lucid summary of facts and concepts relating to well-known methods as well as recent developments in nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Methods are all described from a unifying point of view, which helps to highlight their respective strengths and shortcomings. The presentation will appeal to statisticians, computer scientists and data analysts, and other practitioners having a basic background in statistics or computational learning.

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Statistical Learning from a Regression Perspective considers statistical learning applications when interest centers on the conditional distribution of the response variable, given a set of predictors, and when it is important to characterize how the predictors are related to the response. As a first approximation, this is can be seen as an extension of nonparametric regression. Among the statistical learning procedures examined are bagging, random forests, boosting, and support vector machines. Response variables may be quantitative or categorical. Real applications are emphasized, especially those with practical implications. One important theme is the need to explicitly take into account asymmetric costs in the fitting process. For example, in some situations false positives may be far less costly than false negatives. Another important theme is to not automatically cede modeling decisions to a fitting algorithm. In many settings, subject-matter knowledge should trump formal fitting criteria. Yet another important theme is to appreciate the limitation of one's data and not apply statistical learning procedures that require more than the data can provide. The material is written for graduate students in the social and life sciences and for researchers who want to apply statistical learning procedures to scientific and policy problems. Intuitive explanations and visual representations are prominent. All of the analyses included are done in R.

Large observational studies involving research questions that require the measurement of several features on each individual arise in many fields including the social and medical sciences. This book sets out both the general concepts and the more technical statistical issues involved in analysis and interpretation. Numerous illustrative examples are described in outline and four studies are discussed in some detail. The use of graphical representations of dependencies and independencies among the features under study is stressed, both to incorporate available knowledge at the planning stage of an analysis and to summarize aspects important for interpretation after detailed statistical analysis is complete. This book is aimed at research workers using statistical methods as well as statisticians involved in empirical research.

In this definitive book, D. R. Cox gives a comprehensive and balanced appraisal of statistical inference. He develops the key concepts, describing and comparing the main ideas and controversies over foundational issues that have been keenly argued for more than two-hundred years. Continuing a sixty-year career of major contributions to statistical thought, no one is better placed to give this much-needed account of the field. An appendix gives a more personal assessment of the merits of different ideas. The content ranges from the traditional to the contemporary. While specific applications are not treated, the book is strongly motivated by applications across the sciences and associated technologies. The mathematics is kept as elementary as feasible, though previous knowledge of statistics is assumed. The book will be valued by every user or student of statistics who is serious about understanding the uncertainty inherent in conclusions from statistical analyses.

The aim of this book is to discuss the fundamental ideas which lie behind the statistical theory of learning and generalization. It considers learning as a general problem of function estimation based on empirical data. Omitting proofs and technical details, the author concentrates on discussing the main results of learning theory and their connections to fundamental problems in statistics. This second edition contains three new chapters devoted to further development of the learning theory and SVM techniques. Written in a readable and concise style, the book is intended for statisticians, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.