The book starts with a range of examples and develops techniques progressively, starting with standard least squares prediction of a single variable from another and moving onto shrinkage techniques for multiple variables. Chapters 6 and 7 refer mostly to methods that have been specifically developed for spectroscopy. The other chapters are quite general in their applicability. Likelihood and Bayesian inference features strongly, the latter allowing flexible analysis of a wide range of multivariate regression problems. The last chapter presents some Bayesian approaches to pattern recognition.For teaching purposes instructors may find particular chapters sufficiently self contained to recommend in isolation as reference or reading material. For example chapter 4 gives an in depth development of a range of shrinkage techniques. including partial least squares regression, ridge regression and principal components regression; together with discussion of the recently proposed continuum regression. Chapter 8 on pattern recognition may also be of us by itself in courses on multivariate analysis and Bayesian Statistics.
