An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning an essential toolset for making sense of the vast & complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance to marketing to astrophysics in the past twenty years This book presents some of the most important modeling & prediction techniques along with relevant applications Topics include linear regression classification resampling methods shrinkage approaches tree-based methods support vector machines clustering & more Color graphics & real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented Since the goal of this textbook is to facilitate the use of these statistical learning techniques by practitioners in science industry & other fields each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses & methods presented in R an extremely popular open source statistical software platform Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie Tibshirani & Friedman 2nd edition 2009) a popular reference book for statistics & machine learning researchers An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics but at a level accessible to a much broader audience This book is targeted at statisticians & non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression & no knowledge of matrix algebra