blog/content/reviews/books/clojure-for-machine-learning.md

+++
title = "Clojure for Machine Learning - Akhil Wali"
date = 2017-05-01
updated = 2021-02-12

[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "akhil wali", "reviews", "clojure", "it", "machine learning",
"stars:2", "published:2014"]
+++

[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22062479-clojure-for-machine-learning):
Clojure for Machine Learning is an introduction to machine learning techniques
and algorithms. This book demonstrates how you can apply these techniques to
real-world problems using the Clojure programming language.

It explores many machine learning techniques and also describes how to use
Clojure to build machine learning systems. This book starts off by introducing
the simple machine learning problems of regression and classification. It also
describes how you can implement these machine learning techniques in Clojure.
The book also demonstrates several Clojure libraries, which can be useful in
solving machine learning problems.

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{{ stars(stars=2) }}

If I ever read a book with a misleading title, that would be it.

Not because there is no Clojure in it, but the amount of Clojure used is
minimal compared to the whole.

Also, not because there is no Machine Learning in it, but the book goes as
deep as explaining the algorithms behind each common machine learning
technique, without explaining *when* you should use it. There is ample
discussion about the mathematical context of each method, but it explains
absolutely nothing about machine learning itself -- it's purely a bunch of
mathematical equations that could be use to extract some pattern, but it's
hardly "machine learning" at this point.

(Also: Neural networks as "unsupervised learning"?!?)

So, good book on the math behind some machine learning equations, very bad
clojure, very bad machine learning.