Do you find deep learning difficult?
So you want to learn about deep learning and neural networks, but you don't have a clue what machine learning even is. This book is for you.
Perhaps you've already tried to read some tutorials about deep learning, and were just left scratching your head because you did not understand any of it. This book is for you.
Believe the hype. Deep learning is making waves. At the time of this writing (March 2016), Google's AlghaGo program just beat 9-dan professional Go player Lee Sedol at the game of Go, a Chinese board game.
Experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence thought we were 10 years away from achieving a victory against a top professional Go player, but progress seems to have accelerated!
While deep learning is a complex subject, it is not any more difficult to learn than any other machine learning algorithm. I wrote this book to introduce you to the prerequisites of neural networks, so that learning about neural networks in the future will seem like a natural extension of these topics. You will get along fine with undergraduate-level math and programming skill.
All the materials in this book can be downloaded and installed for free. We will use the Python programming language, along with the numerical computing library Numpy.
Unlike other machine learning algorithms, deep learning is particularly powerful because it automatically learns features. That means you don't need to spend your time trying to come up with and test "kernels" or "interaction effects" - something only statisticians love to do. Instead, we will eventually let the neural network learn these things for us. Each layer of the neural network is made up of logistic regression units.
Do you want a gentle introduction to this "dark art", with practical code examples that you can try right away and apply to your own data? Then this book is for you.
This book was designed to contain all the prerequisite information you need for my next book, Deep Learning in Python: Master Data Science and Machine Learning with Modern Neural Networks written in Python, Theano, and TensorFlow.
There are many techniques that you should be comfortable with before diving into deep learning. For example, the "backpropagation" algorithm is just gradient descent, which is the same technique that is used to solve logistic regression.
The error functions and output functions of a neural network are exactly the same as those used in linear regression and logistic regression. The training process is nearly identical. Thus, learning about linear regression and logistic regression before you embark on your deep learning journey will make things much, much simpler for you.
Required resources
Following this book does not require any external materials. Everything needed (Python, and some Python libraries) can be obtained for free.
