Here Are 10 Free Must-Read Books for Machine Learning and Data Science

1. Python Data Science Handbook
By Jake VanderPlas

The book introduces the core libraries essential for working with data in Python: particularly IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and related packages. Familiarity with Python as a language is assumed; if you need a quick introduction to the language itself, see the free companion project, A Whirlwind Tour of Python: it’s a fast-paced introduction to the Python language aimed at researchers and scientists.

2. Neural Networks and Deep Learning

By Michael Nielsen

Neural Networks and Deep Learning is a free online book. The book will teach you about:

– Neural networks, a beautiful biologically-inspired programming paradigm which enables a computer to learn from observational data

– Deep learning, a powerful set of techniques for learning in neural networks

Neural networks and deep learning currently provide the best solutions to many problems in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing. This book will teach you many of the core concepts behind neural networks and deep learning.

4. Machine Learning & Big Data

By Kareem Alkaseer

This is a work in progress, which I add to as time allows. The purpose behind it is to have a balance between theory and implementation for the software engineer to implement machine learning models comfortably without relying too much on libraries. Most of the time the concept behind a model or a technique is simple or intutivei but it gets lost in details or jargon. Also, most of the time existing libraries would solve the problem at hand but they are treated as black boxes and more often than not they have their own abstractions and architectures that hide the underlying concepts. This book’s attempt is to make the underlying concepts clear.

5. Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations
By Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Martin Wainwright

During the past decade there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. This book descibes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework.

6. Statistical inference for data science

By Brian Caffo

This book is written as a companion book to the Statistical Inference Coursera class as part of the Data Science Specialization. However, if you do not take the class, the book mostly stands on its own. A useful component of the book is a series of YouTube videos that comprise the Coursera class.

The book is intended to be a low cost introduction to the important field of statistical inference. The intended audience are students who are numerically and computationally literate, who would like to put those skills to use in Data Science or Statistics. The book is offered for free as a series of markdown documents on github and in more convenient forms (epub, mobi) on LeanPub and retail outlets.

Read the complete source list at KDnuggets.com.