Math for Programmers

16 Training neural networks

This chapter covers

• Classifying images of handwritten digits as vector data
• Designing a type of neural network called a multilayer perceptron
• Evaluating a neural network as a vector transformation
• Fitting a neural network to data with a cost function and gradient descent
• Calculating partial derivatives for neural networks in backpropagation

In the final chapter of this book, we combine almost everything you’ve learned so far to introduce one of the most famous machine learning tools used today: artificial neural networks. Artificial neural networks, or neural networks for short, are mathematical functions whose structure is loosely based on the structure of the human brain. These are called artificial to distinguish ...