An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance to marketing to astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree-based methods, support vector machines, clustering, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. Since the goal of this textbook is to facilitate the use of these statistical learning techniques by practitioners in science, industry, and other fields, each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in R, an extremely popular open source statistical software platform. Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2nd edition 2009), a popular reference book for statistics and machine learning researchers. An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics, but at a level accessible to a much broader audience. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression and no knowledge of matrix algebra.

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a new generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. SVMs deliver state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications such as text categorisation, hand-written character recognition, image classification, biosequences analysis, etc., and are now established as one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining. Students will find the book both stimulating and accessible, while practitioners will be guided smoothly through the material required for a good grasp of the theory and its applications. The concepts are introduced gradually in accessible and self-contained stages, while the presentation is rigorous and thorough. Pointers to relevant literature and web sites containing software ensure that it forms an ideal starting point for further study. Equally, the book and its associated web site will guide practitioners to updated literature, new applications, and on-line software.

This book covers the field of machine learning, which is the study of algorithms that allow computer programs to automatically improve through experience. The book is intended to support upper level undergraduate and introductory level graduate courses in machine learning.