Trevor Hastie, Stanford University Dept. of Statistics
        Robert Tibshirani, Stanford University Dept. of Statistics
        Jerome Friedman Stanford University Dept. of Statistics
This book is our attempt to bring together many of the important new ideas in learning, and explain them in a statistical framework. While some mathematical details are needed, we emphasize the methods and their conceptual underpinnings rather than their theoretical properties. As a result, we hope that this book will appeal not just to statisticians but also to researchers and practitioners in a wide variety of fields.
Just as we have learned a great deal from researchers outside of the field of statistics, our statistical viewpoint may help others to better understand different aspects of learning: