By Gregory Piatetsky, @kdnuggets, Jun 23, 2014.

The amazing Italian researchers, Roberto Battiti and Mauro Brunato, authors of LIONsolver software, have recently written LION: Learning and Intelligent Optimization textbook, and made it freely available on the web. This textbook presents important materials on machine learning and optimization, but does it in a very entertaining and readable style, with excellent illustrations.

Now they also created The LIONcommunity page with materials on machine learning and optimization made available by their lab and a community of active researchers and users.

This includes

• Slides related to the LIONbook (from Chapter 2 to Chapter 19),
• Tutorial movies
• Exercises
  • K nearest neighbors.
  • Learning with method (training and generalization).
  • Handwritten digit recognition with linear regression.
  • Digit recognition with CART trees and democratic forests.
  
   
  
• Use cases for the Caltech course "Learning from Data"
  • The danger of overfitting.
  • Logistic regression for predicting heart disease.
  • Marketing automation for banks via SVM and cross-validation.
  
   
  
• Mixed Usage Cases in Marketing, E-Commerce etc.
  • Evaluating bank customers asking for credit.
  • Network analytics: "focus and context" visualization, social networks.
  • Collaborative recommendation: movies and viewers.
  • Web mining and the network of USA politicians.
  • Asset portfolio selection in finance.
  • Predictive analytics: neural networks.
  • The French invasion of Russia.
  • Reactive Search Optimization: identifying optimal solutions.
  
   
  

 
Check all those amazing resources and more at intelligent-optimization.org/LIONbook/lioncommunity.html

You can also use The LIONoso software, a comprehensive Machine Learning and Intelligent Optimization tool, freely available for non-profit, academic use.