Connectionists: Book announcement - Rasmussen

[David Weininger]

Hi all:

I thought that Connectionists readers might be interested in the following 
new title from MIT Press. More information about the book is available at 
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/SP2006026218253X. Thanks!

Best,
David

Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning
Carl Edward Rasmussen and Christopher K. I. Williams

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a principled, practical, probabilistic 
approach to learning in kernel machines. GPs have received increasing 
attention in the machine-learning community over the past decade, and this 
book provides a long-needed systematic and unified treatment of theoretical 
and practical aspects of GPs in machine learning. The treatment is 
comprehensive and self-contained, targeted at researchers and students in 
machine learning and applied statistics.
The book deals with the supervised-learning problem for both regression and 
classification, and includes detailed algorithms. A wide variety of 
covariance (kernel) functions are presented and their properties discussed. 
Model selection is discussed both from a Bayesian and a classical 
perspective. Many connections to other well-known techniques from machine 
learning and statistics are discussed, including support-vector machines, 
neural networks, splines, regularization networks, relevance vector 
machines and others. Theoretical issues including learning curves and the 
PAC-Bayesian framework are treated, and several approximation methods for 
learning with large datasets are discussed. The book contains illustrative 
examples and exercises, and code and datasets are available on the Web. 
Appendixes provide mathematical background and a discussion of Gaussian 
Markov processes.

Carl Edward Rasmussen is a Research Scientist at the Department of 
Empirical Inference for Machine Learning and Perception at the Max Planck 
Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen. Christopher K. I. Williams 
is Professor of Machine Learning and Director of the Institute for Adaptive 
and Neural Computation in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

8 x 10, 272 pp., cloth, ISBN 0-262-18253-X


David Weininger
Associate Publicist
MIT Press
55 Hayward Street
Cambridge, MA 02142-1315
617.253.2079
617.253.1709 fax
dgw at mit.edu
Check out the new MIT Press Log
http://mitpress.mit.edu/presslog