The Elements of Statistical Learning
Yesterday, I made a lot of progress with the website. WordPress is incredibly powerful even when you don’t really know what you’re doing with it (like me), and I’m sure that I’ll discover even more utility as I become more
familiar with the platform. Lots more tinkering in store for today.
In other news, when I won the College Prize for Excellence in Statistics last month, I was given a nice little certificate and a wrapped gift. The gift turned out to be The Elements of Statistical Learning (TESL) by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman. I don’t know which faculty member(s) chose this textbook for me, but he/she/they couldn’t have made a better choice. Toward the end of the school year, when I was looking for math projects to do this summer, I visited Robert Tibshirani’s website after hearing his name mentioned in classes for years. The topics of data mining and supervised learning are quite hot these days, and I thought his textbook would be a great introduction to the subjects. I had downloaded the available course materials for the Stanford course he taught using TESL and was ready to go, except I didn’t have the book. And *poof!* There it was.
I started reading through it yesterday, and so far so good! This morning, I spent some time getting R packages installed and configured on my desktop computer, so hopefully this afternoon I’ll be able to work through some of the examples.