Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition

When I came across this book, I had already read several on the subject, including Beale & Jackson (lightweight) and Haykin (middleweight)For a reader unafraid of basic statistics and linear algebra, this is an excellent beginning book. For the math wary, I would say read a math-lite conceptual book first. This was a text book in my master's program, and I heard from students with a weak math background that they found it extremely challenging.Bishop rightly emphasizes the statistical foundations of feedforward networks. This is a large subject in and of itself, and he covers it well. It provides an extremely solid foundation.Neural dynamics via recurrence, Hopfield Nets, and many other topics outside or on the edges of feedforward networks are not covered. I find many NN books are poorly written, imprecise, and have little content. This is one of the best books I have read on the subject.

Do not be put off by the title: this book is more about pattern recognition than neural networks. Of course it covers neural networks, but the central aim of the book is to investigate statistical approaches to the problem of pattern recognition. An excellent companion to "Duda & Hart".As other reviewers have said: you will need a reasonable maths or stats background to get the most out of this book.

This book came out at about the same time as Ripley's, which has almost the same title, but in reverse. At the time, I liked Ripley's better, because it covered more things that were totally new to me. Then a friend said he had chosen Bishop for a course he was teaching, and I went back and reconsidered the two books. I soon found that my friend was right: Bishop's book is better laid out for a course in that it starts at the beginning (well, not quite the beginning--you do need to be fairly sophisticated mathematically) and works up, while Ripley's is more a collection of insights all at the same level; confusing to learn from. Bishop is able to cover both theoretical and practical aspects well. There certainly are topics that aren't covered, but the ones that are there fit together nicely, are accurate and up to date, and are easy to understand. It has migrated from my bookcase to my desk, where it now stays, and I reach for it often. To the reviewer who said "I was looking forward to a detailed insight into neural networks in this book. Instead, almost every page is plastered up with sigma notation", that's like saying about a book on music theory "Instead, almost every page is plastered with black-and-white ovals (some with sticks on the edge)." Or to the reviewer who complains this book is limited to the mathematical side of neural nets, that's like complaining about a cookbook on beef being limited to the carnivore side. If you want a non-technical overview, you can get that elsewhere (e.g. Michael Arbib's Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks or Andy Clark's Connectionism in Context or Fausett's Fundamentals of Neural Networks), but if you want understanding of the techniques, you have to understand the math. Otherwise, there's no beef.

Rarely do I encounter a book of such technical quality that also is a pleasure to read. Bishop moves through sometimes difficult topics in a clear, well-motivated style that is appropriate as both an introduction and a desktop reference on neural nets. Definitely on the "A list."Bishop chose to not include discussions on a number of topics that might have diluted his focus on pattern recognition (for example, Hebbian learning and neural net approaches to principal components analysis). I think that these choices greatly strengthened the integrity of his presentation. I would love to see an updated edition with a discussion of recent results in statistical learning theory, kernel methods and support vector machines.

I'd like to agree with previous reviewers. Note that you will need a good mathematical background (especially in statistics) to understand the content. However, the book is completely thorough in developing all the key concepts and really tries to give you insight into the meaning behind the equations. It's style is that of an undergraduate level textbook, but a very well written one. To use neural nets effectively, I think you need to have at least one book like this.