Inference in Statistical Modelling and Machine Learning

Statistical modelling and machine learning offer a vast toolbox of inference methods with which to model the world, discover patterns and reach beyond the data to make predictions when the truth is not certain. This concise book provides a clear introduction to those tools and to the core ideas – probabilistic model, likelihood, prior, posterior, overfitting, underfitting, cross-validation – that unify them. A mixture of toy and real examples illustrates diverse applications ranging from biomedical data to treasure hunts, while the accompanying datasets and computational notebooks in R and Python encourage hands-on learning. Instructors can benefit from online lecture slides and exercise solutions. Requiring only first-year university-level knowledge of calculus, probability and linear algebra, the book equips students in statistics, data science and machine learning, as well as those in quantitative applied and social science programmes, with the tools and conceptual foundations to explore more advanced techniques.

James Burridge is Professor of Probability and Statistical Physics at the University of Portsmouth, where he teaches probability, stochastic processes and statistical learning. He models language, birdsong, rocks, tessellations and games, and develops commercial applications of machine learning in green technology. Nick Tosh is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Galway. He has published on methodological disputes in the history of science and on the interpretation of probability. Until 2024, he coordinated Galway's Arts with Data Science BA.