recommended reading

Latent Variable and Graphical Models

• Build, Compute, Critique, Repeat: Data Analysis with Latent Variable Models
• Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques

Variational Inference (and Exponential Families)

• Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians
• Variational Inference Lecture Notes (the Exponential Families notes from this class are also excellent)
• Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and Variational Inference

Recommendation Systems

• Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems
• Recommender Systems Handbook

Topic Modeling

• Probabilistic Topic Models
• Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Machine Learning / Data Analysis Textbooks

• Bayesian Data Analysis
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
• Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective

Writing

• The Elements of Style
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Misc

• Computational Social Science ≠ Computer Science + Social Data
• Tidy Data