Skip to Content
Deep Learning from Scratch
book

Deep Learning from Scratch

by Seth Weidman
September 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
250 pages
6h 58m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Book available
Content preview from Deep Learning from Scratch

Preface

If you’ve tried to learn about neural networks and deep learning, you’ve probably encountered an abundance of resources, from blog posts to MOOCs (massive open online courses, such as those offered on Coursera and Udacity) of varying quality and even some books—I know I did when I started exploring the subject a few years ago. However, if you’re reading this preface, it’s likely that each explanation of neural networks that you’ve come across is lacking in some way. I found the same thing when I started learning: the various explanations were like blind men describing different parts of an elephant, but none describing the whole thing. That is what led me to write this book.

These existing resources on neural networks mostly fall into two categories. Some are conceptual and mathematical, containing both the drawings one typically finds in explanations of neural networks, of circles connected by lines with arrows on the ends, as well as extensive mathematical explanations of what is going on so you can “understand the theory.” A prototypical example of this is the very good book Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow et al. (MIT Press).

Other resources have dense blocks of code that, if run, appear to show a loss value decreasing over time and thus a neural network “learning.” For instance, the following example from the PyTorch documentation does indeed define and train a simple neural network on randomly generated data:

# N is batch size; D_in is input dimension;
# H is hidden ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch

Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch

Jeremy Howard, Sylvain Gugger

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492041405Errata PageSupplemental Content