Look up detailed derivations of machine learning formulas when studying the Watermelon Book textbook.
Work through step-by-step proofs of algorithms and mathematical concepts covered in university-level ML courses.
Access free educational reference material in Chinese for understanding foundational machine learning theory.
The Pumpkin Book (南瓜书) is a Chinese-language companion guide to a famous Chinese machine learning textbook known as the "Watermelon Book" (西瓜书), written by Professor Zhouzhihua, one of China's most respected researchers in the field. The Watermelon Book is a standard university-level machine learning text, but it skips over many mathematical derivation steps to keep it accessible. The Pumpkin Book fills in those gaps, providing detailed step-by-step walkthroughs of the formulas and proofs that the original book leaves as exercises. In practical terms: if you are a Chinese-speaking student or engineer studying the Watermelon Book and you get stuck on how a particular formula was derived, you look it up in the Pumpkin Book for the full explanation. This is a community project maintained by Datawhale, a Chinese open-source AI education organization. The content is available free on GitHub, downloadable as a PDF, and also published as a physical book through a Chinese publisher. Companion video tutorials are available on Bilibili (China's video platform). For a non-technical founder: this is educational reference material for Chinese-speaking machine learning students. It is not software you can run or build on. Its 25,000+ GitHub stars reflect how many students in China are studying machine learning from these textbooks. It would only be relevant to your work if you are building learning tools or content for the Chinese developer/student market.
Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.