Machine learning classifiers and fMRI : A tutorial overview (Francisco Pereira, Tom Mitchell, Matthew Botvinick). doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.11.007
Haynes JD. 2015. A Primer on Pattern-Based Approaches to fMRI: Principles, Pitfalls, and Perspectives. Neuron, 87 (2), 257-70. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.05.025 PMID: 26182413
Relationship between RSA and "MVPA" (decoding and encoding; RSA is a multivariate pattern analysis method like the others): Representational models: A common framework for understanding encoding, pattern-component, and representational-similarity analysis https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005508
This one is easy and speaks about MVPA, RSA & co: Haxby, J. V. , Connolly, A. C. and Guntupalli, J. S. (2014). Decoding Neural Representational Spaces Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 37, 435-436. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-062012-170325 The pdf file is accessible here : http://haxbylab.dartmouth.edu/publications/HCG14.pdf
Interesting web sites :
Some articles for beginning :