I've spent a lot of time trying to work my way through C. Bishop - Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning but I find it a bit difficult to get into. I commonly use a lot of techniques (Logit/SVMs/MRFs - I work in Vision) but I don't really have a deep understanding of the "story" of how we arrived at each approach and the mathematical steps it took to get there. I need a book which holds my hand for the first chapter or two so I can improve my maths (British maths education...). Can anyone make any recommendations?
edit: Thanks a lot for all the responses - I've made a few purchases. Hopefully see you Vision guys around ;)
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