“This modern treatment of machine learning is notable for its coverage of emerging, important topics, from datasets and deep learning to optimization, causal inference, and social context, along the way pointing out the attendant perils that come from flawed predictions.”―David C. Parkes, Harvard University “Patterns, Predictions, and Actions is not your everyday machine learning book; it’s rigorous not only in its mathematics but in its insistence on thinking about what the machines are really doing and what the subject is really about.”―Jordan Ellenberg, author of Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else “Like Hansel and Gretel, machine learning students find themselves in an intellectual forest, struggling to digest a morass of ephemeral ideas. Hardt and Recht use history, theory, and society to expose the topology of this landscape. Patterns, Predictions, and Actions is a new foundational text for the field.”―Neil Lawrence, University of Cambridge