A_First_Course_in_Machine_Learning.

This book is based on material taught in a machine learning course in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, UK. The course, presented to nal year undergraduates and postgraduates, is made up of 20 hour-long lectures and 10 hour-long laboratory sessions. In such a short teach- ing period, it is impossible to cover more than a small fraction of the material that now comes under the banner of machine learning. Our intention when teaching this course therefore, is to present the core mathematical and sta- tistical techniques required to understand some of the most popular machine learning algorithms and then present a few of these algorithms that span the main problem areas within machine learning: classication, clustering and projection. At the end of the course, the students should have the knowledge and condence to be able to explore the machine learning literature to nd methods that are more appropriate to them.