[astrophysician]

I think PGM's are covered by a lot of "standard" ML texts -- someone else mentioned Murphy's book which is great and is humongous but is a good reference for pretty much every method under the sun.

Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning has a chapter thats free online: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[jclos]

I'd just like to add that the entire PRML book is now free online, not just the sample: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2006/0...