You’ve probably been told to standardize or normalize inputs to your model to improve performance. But what is normalization and how can we implement it easily in our deep learning models to improve performance? Normalizing our inputs aims to create a set of features that are on the same scale as each other, which we’ll […]
Archive | Deep Learning Performance
Visualizing the vanishing gradient problem
Deep learning was a recent invention. Partially, it is due to improved computation power that allows us to use more layers of perceptrons in a neural network. But at the same time, we can train a deep network only after we know how to work around the vanishing gradient problem. In this tutorial, we visually […]
How to Demonstrate Your Basic Skills with Deep Learning
Skills in deep learning are in great demand, although these skills can be challenging to identify and to demonstrate. Explaining that you are familiar with a technique or type of problem is very different to being able to use it effectively with open source APIs on real datasets. Perhaps the most effective way of demonstrating […]
Why Training a Neural Network Is Hard
Or, Why Stochastic Gradient Descent Is Used to Train Neural Networks. Fitting a neural network involves using a training dataset to update the model weights to create a good mapping of inputs to outputs. This training process is solved using an optimization algorithm that searches through a space of possible values for the neural network […]
How to use Learning Curves to Diagnose Machine Learning Model Performance
A learning curve is a plot of model learning performance over experience or time. Learning curves are a widely used diagnostic tool in machine learning for algorithms that learn from a training dataset incrementally. The model can be evaluated on the training dataset and on a hold out validation dataset after each update during training […]
Recommendations for Deep Learning Neural Network Practitioners
Deep learning neural networks are relatively straightforward to define and train given the wide adoption of open source libraries. Nevertheless, neural networks remain challenging to configure and train. In his 2012 paper titled “Practical Recommendations for Gradient-Based Training of Deep Architectures” published as a preprint and a chapter of the popular 2012 book “Neural Networks: […]
8 Tricks for Configuring Backpropagation to Train Better Neural Networks
Neural network models are trained using stochastic gradient descent and model weights are updated using the backpropagation algorithm. The optimization solved by training a neural network model is very challenging and although these algorithms are widely used because they perform so well in practice, there are no guarantees that they will converge to a good […]
Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade Review
Deep learning neural networks are challenging to configure and train. There are decades of tips and tricks spread across hundreds of research papers, source code, and in the heads of academics and practitioners. The book “Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade” originally published in 1998 and updated in 2012 at the cusp of the deep […]
How to Get Better Deep Learning Results (7-Day Mini-Course)
Better Deep Learning Neural Networks Crash Course. Get Better Performance From Your Deep Learning Models in 7 Days. Configuring neural network models is often referred to as a “dark art.” This is because there are no hard and fast rules for configuring a network for a given problem. We cannot analytically calculate the optimal model […]
A Gentle Introduction to the Challenge of Training Deep Learning Neural Network Models
Deep learning neural networks learn a mapping function from inputs to outputs. This is achieved by updating the weights of the network in response to the errors the model makes on the training dataset. Updates are made to continually reduce this error until either a good enough model is found or the learning process gets […]