Peter Flach has more than twenty years of experience in machine learning teaching and research. He is Editor-in-Chief of Machine Learning and Program Co-Chair of the 2009 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and the 2012 European Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining. His research spans all aspects of machine learning, from knowledge representation and the use of logic to learn from highly structured data to the analysis and evaluation of machine learning models and methods to large-scale data mining. He is particularly known for his innovative use of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis for understanding and improving machine learning methods. These innovations have proved their effectiveness in a number of invited talks and tutorials and now form the backbone of this book.

• Prologue: a machine learning sampler; 1. The ingredients of machine learning; 2. Binary classification and related tasks; 3. Beyond binary classification; 4. Concept learning; 5. Tree models; 6. Rule models; 7. Linear models; 8. Distance-based models; 9. Probabilistic models; 10. Features; 11. In brief: model ensembles; 12. In brief: machine learning experiments; Epilogue: where to go from here; Important points to remember; Bibliography; Index.

"This textbook is clearly written and well organized. Starting from the basics, the author skillfully guides the reader through his learning process by providing useful facts and insight into the behavior of several machine learning techniques, as well as the high-level pseudocode of many key algorithms." < /br>Fernando Berzal, Computing Reviews