Statistical Learning

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

Statistical Learning Introduction with R Applications is an indispensable resource for anyone looking to explore the world of statistical learning with the powerful R software.

Statistical Learning from a Regression Perspective considers statistical learning applications when interest centers on the conditional distribution of the response variable, given a set of predictors, and when it is important to characterize how the predictors are related to the response. As a first approximation, this is can be seen as an extension of nonparametric regression.