Machine Learning Engineering

From the author of a world bestseller published in eleven languages, The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, this new book by Andriy Burkov is the most complete applied AI book out there. It is filled with best practices and design patterns of building reliable machine learning solutions that scale. Andriy Burkov has a Ph.D. in AI and is the leader of a machine learning team at Gartner. This book is based on Andriy’s own 15 years of experience in solving problems with AI as well as on the published experience of the industry leaders.

Here’s what Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google tells about the book in the Foreword:

“You’re looking at one of the few true Applied Machine Learning books out there. That’s right, you found one! A real applied needle in the haystack of research-oriented stuff. Excellent job, dear reader… unless what you were actually looking for is a book to help you learn the skills to design general-purpose algorithms, in which case I hope the author won’t be too upset with me for telling you to flee now and go pick up pretty much any other machine learning book. This one is different.”
[…]
“So, what’s in […] the book? The machine learning equivalent of a bumper guide to innovating in recipes to make food at scale. Since you haven’t read the book yet, I’ll put it in culinary terms: you’ll need to figure out what’s worth cooking / what the objectives are (decision-making and product management), understand the suppliers and the customers (domain expertise and business acumen), how to process ingredients at scale (data engineering and analysis), how to try many different ingredient-appliance combinations quickly to generate potential recipes (prototype phase ML engineering), how to check that the quality of the recipe is good enough to serve (statistics), how to turn a potential recipe into millions of dishes served efficiently (production phase ML engineering), and how to ensure that your dishes stay top-notch even if the delivery truck brings you a ton of potatoes instead of the rice you ordered (reliability engineering). This book is one of the few to offer perspectives on each step of the end-to-end process.”
[…]
“One of my favorite things about this book is how fully it embraces the most important thing you need to know about machine learning: mistakes are possible… and sometimes they hurt. As my colleagues in site reliability engineering love to say, “Hope is not a strategy.” Hoping that there will be no mistakes is the worst approach you can take. This book does so much better. It promptly shatters any false sense of security you were tempted to have about building an AI system that is more “intelligent” than you are. (Um, no. Just no.) Then it diligently takes you through a survey of all kinds of things that can go wrong in practice and how to prevent/detect/handle them. This book does a great job of outlining the importance of monitoring, how to approach model maintenance, what to do when things go wrong, how to think about fallback strategies for the kinds of mistakes you can’t anticipate, how to deal with adversaries who try to exploit your system, and how to manage the expectations of your human users (there’s also a section on what to do when your, er, users are machines). These are hugely important topics in practical machine learning, but they’re so often neglected in other books. Not here.”

“If you intend to use machine learning to solve business problems at scale, I’m delighted you got your hands on this book. Enjoy!”