I have been reading Programming Collective Intelligence on my daily travel to NY. This is a gem of a book. It covers many topics in machine learning, that can be applied to projects. All with practical examples and code in python. i had no idea that current machine learning algorithm were any useful. But this book puts so much of AI jargon in to practical use. A typical AI book will confuse the heck with the maths proofs and statistics. But this book is pure practical with jucy examples one can easily understand and put to use! Many hip words in AI made some sense to me after reading this book. e.g. Genetic Programming, Genetic Algorithm (yes they are different), baysian classifiers, hiearchical clustering, k-means clustering, optimization, anealing, hill climbing, decision trees, support vector machines.
Some practical algorithms with code and examples covered.
a) Making Recommendations for movies (e.g. similar to Netflix movie recommendation, or matchmaking ).
b) Writing a search engine, and search results.
c) Optimization algorithms. (optimization is finding a good enough solution when the optimal solution is expensive to find).
d) Document Filtring, e.g. Spam Filter
e) Discovering Groups in a large set of data / Clustering
f) Building Price Models e.g. determining the price of a home given a large data with features.
g) Evloving Intelligence. Genertic Programming.