Machine learning and deep learning models, like those in Keras, require all input and output variables to be numeric. This means that if your data contains categorical data, you must encode it to numbers before you can fit and evaluate a model. The two most popular techniques are an integer encoding and a one hot […]
Deep Learning is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks. If you are just starting out in the field of deep learning or you had some experience with neural networks some time ago, you may be confused. I know I was confused […]
Keras is a powerful and easy-to-use free open source Python library for developing and evaluating deep learning models. It wraps the efficient numerical computation libraries Theano and TensorFlow and allows you to define and train neural network models in just a few lines of code. In this tutorial, you will discover how to create your […]
Keras is a simple and powerful Python library for deep learning. Given that deep learning models can take hours, days and even weeks to train, it is important to know how to save and load them from disk. In this post, you will discover how you can save your Keras models to file and load them […]
Once you fit a deep learning neural network model, you must evaluate its performance on a test dataset. This is critical, as the reported performance allows you to both choose between candidate models and to communicate to stakeholders about how good the model is at solving the problem. The Keras deep learning API model is […]
Deep learning is not a magic bullet, but the techniques have shown to be highly effective in a large number of very challenging problem domains. This means that there is a ton of demand by businesses for effective deep learning practitioners. The problem is, how can the average business differentiate between good and bad practitioners? […]
Practical deep learning is a challenging subject in which to get started. It is often taught in a bottom-up manner, requiring that you first get familiar with linear algebra, calculus, and mathematical optimization before eventually learning the neural network techniques. This can take years, and most of the background theory will not help you to […]
The weights of artificial neural networks must be initialized to small random numbers. This is because this is an expectation of the stochastic optimization algorithm used to train the model, called stochastic gradient descent. To understand this approach to problem solving, you must first understand the role of nondeterministic and randomized algorithms as well as […]
What neural network is appropriate for your predictive modeling problem? It can be difficult for a beginner to the field of deep learning to know what type of network to use. There are so many types of networks to choose from and new methods being published and discussed every day. To make things worse, most […]
Stochastic gradient descent is a learning algorithm that has a number of hyperparameters. Two hyperparameters that often confuse beginners are the batch size and number of epochs. They are both integer values and seem to do the same thing. In this post, you will discover the difference between batches and epochs in stochastic gradient descent. […]
