Happy to see a book like this trending on hn, especially with a sentence like:
"Using fancy tools like neural nets, boosting, and support vector machines without understanding basic statistics is like doing brain surgery before knowing how to use a band-aid."
in it's preface. I definitely agree, since I wasted a lot of time doing fruitless surgeries before I went and learned about band aids in depth.
From my look at Part 1, it has some great coverage of the basics, all of which are important. Some of the fundamentals that I see left out are rightly left out since they require experience in real analysis to appreciate, and maybe aren't very actionable. There's few proofs, but, since the goal is a quick understanding, I can also appreciate this.
It looks to me like a great intro of statistics for CS people, as the author says.
From my look at Part 1, it has some great coverage of the basics, all of which are important. Some of the fundamentals that I see left out are rightly left out since they require experience in real analysis to appreciate, and maybe aren't very actionable. There's few proofs, but, since the goal is a quick understanding, I can also appreciate this.
It looks to me like a great intro of statistics for CS people, as the author says.