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MEAP Edition
Manning Early Access Program
Deep Learning with R
Version 1

Copyright 2017 Manning Publications

For more information on this and other Manning titles go to


www.manning.com

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welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Deep Learning with R. If you are looking for a
resource to learn about deep learning from scratch and to quickly become able to use this
knowledge to solve real-world problems, you have found the right book. Deep Learning
with R is meant for statisticians, analysts, engineers and students with a reasonable amount
of R experience, but no significant knowledge of machine learning and deep learning. This
book is an adaptation of my previously published Deep Learning with Python, with all of
the code examples using the R interface to Keras. The goal of the book is to provide a
learning resource for the R community that goes all the way from basic theory to advanced
practical applications.
Deep learning is an immensely rich subfield of machine learning, with powerful
applications ranging from machine perception to natural language processing, all the way up
to creative AI. Yet, its core concepts are in fact very simple. Deep learning is often
presented as shrouded in a certain mystique, with references to algorithms that “work like
the brain”, that “think” or “understand”. Reality is however quite far from this science-
fiction dream, and I will do my best in these pages to dispel these illusions. I believe that
there are no difficult ideas in deep learning, and that’s why I started this book, based on
premise that all of the important concepts and applications in this field could be taught to
anyone, with very few prerequisites.
This book is structured around a series of practical code examples, demonstrating on real-
world problems every the notions that gets introduced. I strongly believe in the value of
teaching using concrete examples, anchoring theoretical ideas into actual results and
tangible code patterns. These examples all rely on Keras, the deep learning library. When I
released the initial version of Keras almost two years ago, little did I know that it would
quickly skyrocket to become one of the most widely used deep learning frameworks. A big
part of that success is that Keras has always put ease of use and accessibility front and
center. This same reason is what makes Keras a great library to get started with deep
learning, and thus a great fit for this book. By the time you reach the end of this book, you
will have become a Keras expert.
I hope that you will this book valuable —deep learning will definitely open up new
intellectual perspectives for you, and in fact it even has the potential to transform your
career, being the most in-demand scientific specialization these days. I am looking forward
to your reviews and comments. Your feedback is essential in order to write the best possible
book, that will benefit the greatest number of people.

— François Chollet

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brief contents
PART 1: INTRODUCTION TO DEEP LEARNING
1 What is deep learning?
2 Before we begin: the mathematical blocks of neural networks
3 Getting started with neural networks
4 Fundamentals of machine learning
PART 2: DEEP LEARNING IN PRACTICE
5 Deep learning for computer vision
6 Deep learning for text and sequences
7 Advanced deep learning best practices
8 Generative deep learning
9 Conclusions
APPENDIXES:
A Installing Keras and its dependencies on Ubuntu
B Running RStudio Server on a EC2 GPU instance

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1

This chapter covers


What is deep learning?

High-level definitions of fundamental concepts


1
Timeline of the development of machine learning
Key factors behind deep learning’s rising popularity and future
potential

In the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a subject of intense media hype.
Machine learning, deep learning, and AI come up in countless articles, often outside of
technology-minded publications. We’re being promised a future of intelligent chatbots,
self-driving cars, and virtual assistants—a future sometimes painted in a grim light and
other times as an utopia, where human jobs would be scarce and most economic activity
would be handled by robots or AI agents. This chapter provides essential context around
artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.

1.1 Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning


As a future or current practitioner of machine learning, it’s important to be able to
recognize the signal in the noise so that you can tell world-changing developments from
mere overhyped press releases. Our future is at stake, and it’s a future in which you have
an active role to play: after reading this book, you’ll be one of those who develop the
AIs. So let’s tackle these questions: What has deep learning achieved so far? How
significant is it? Where are we headed next? Should you believe the hype?
First, we need to define clearly what we’re talking about when we mention AI. What
are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning (see figure 1.1)? How do
they relate to each other?

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Figure 1.1 Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning

1.1.1 Artificial intelligence


Artificial intelligence was born in the 1950s, when a handful of pioneers from the nascent
field of computer science started asking whether computers could be made to "think"—a
question whose ramifications we’re still exploring today. A concise definition of the field
would be as follows: the effort to automate intellectual tasks normally performed by
humans. As such, AI is a general field that encompasses machine learning and deep
learning, but that also includes many more approaches that don’t involve any learning.
Early chess programs, for instance, only involved hard-coded rules crafted by
programmers, and didn’t qualify as machine learning. For a fairly long time, many
experts believed that human-level artificial intelligence could be achieved by having
programmers handcraft a sufficiently large set of explicit rules for manipulating
knowledge. This approach is known as symbolic AI, and it was the dominant paradigm in
AI from the 1950s to the late 1980s. It reached its peak popularity during the expert
systems boom of the 1980s.
Although symbolic AI proved suitable to solve well-defined, logical problems, such
as playing chess, it turned out to be intractable to figure out explicit rules for solving
more complex, fuzzy problems, such as image classification, speech recognition, and
language translation. A new approach arose to take symbolic AI’s place: machine
learning.

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1.1.2 Machine Learning


In Victorian England, Lady Ada Lovelace was a friend and collaborator of Charles
Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine: the first known general-purpose,
mechanical computer. Although visionary and far ahead of its time, the Analytical
Engine wasn’t meant as a general-purpose computer when it was designed in the 1830s
and 1840s, because the concept of general-purpose computation was yet to be invented. It
was merely meant as a way to use mechanical operations to automate certain
computations from the field of mathematical analysis—hence the name Analytical
Engine. In 1843, Ada Lovelace remarked on the invention, "The Analytical Engine has
no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order
it to perform.… Its province is to assist us in making available what we’re already
acquainted with."
This remark was later quoted by AI pioneer Alan Turing as "Lady Lovelace’s
objection" in his landmark 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence,"1 which
introduced the Turing test as well as key concepts that would come to shape AI. Turing
was quoting Ada Lovelace while pondering whether general-purpose computers could be
capable of learning and originality, and he came to the conclusion that they could.
Footnote 1mA. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460.

Machine learning arises from this question: could a computer go beyond "what we
know how to order it to perform" and learn on its own how to perform a specified task?
Could a computer surprise us? Rather than programmers crafting data-processing rules
by hand, could a computer automatically learn these rules by looking at data?
This question opens the door to a new programming paradigm. In classical
programming, the paradigm of symbolic AI, humans input rules (a program) and data to
be processed according to these rules, and out come answers (see figure 1.2). With
machine learning, humans input data as well as the answers expected from the data, and
out come the rules. These rules can then be applied to new data to produce original
answers.

Figure 1.2 Machine learning: a new programming paradigm

A machine-learning system is trained rather than explicitly programmed. It’s


presented with many examples relevant to a task, and it finds statistical structure in these
examples that eventually allows the system to come up with rules for automating the
task. For instance, if you wished to automate the task of tagging your vacation pictures,

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you could present a machine-learning system with many examples of pictures already
tagged by humans, and the system would learn statistical rules for associating specific
pictures to specific tags.
Although machine learning only started to flourish in the 1990s, it has quickly
become the most popular and most successful subfield of AI, a trend driven by the
availability of faster hardware and larger datasets. Machine learning is tightly related to
mathematical statistics, but it differs from statistics in several important ways. Unlike
statistics, machine learning tends to deal with large, complex datasets (such as a dataset
of millions of images, each consisting of tens of thousands of pixels) for which classical
statistical analysis such as Bayesian analysis would be impractical. As a result, machine
learning, and especially deep learning, exhibits comparatively little mathematical
theory—maybe too little—and is engineering oriented. It’s a hands-on discipline in
which ideas are proven empirically much more often than theoretically.

1.1.3 Learning representations from data


To define deep learning and understand the difference between deep learning and other
machine-learning approaches, first we need some idea of what machine-learning
algorithms do. We just stated that machine learning discovers rules to execute a
data-processing task, given examples of what’s expected. So, to do machine learning, we
need three things:

Input data points—For instance, if the task is speech recognition, these data points could
be sound files of people speaking. If the task is image tagging, they could be picture files.
Examples of the expected output—In a speech-recognition task, these could be
human-generated transcripts of sound files. In an image task, expected outputs could tags
such as "dog", "cat", and so on.
A way to measure whether the algorithm is doing a good job—This is necessary in order
to determine the distance between the algorithm’s current output and its expected output.
The measurement is used as a feedback signal to adjust the way the algorithm works.
This adjustment step is what we call learning.

A machine-learning model transforms its input data into meaningful output, a process
that is "learned" from exposure to known examples of inputs and outputs. Therefore, the
central problem in machine learning and deep learning is to meaningfully transform data:
in other words, to learn useful representations of the input data at hand—representations
that get us closer to the expected output. Before we go any further: what’s a
representation? At its core, it’s a different way to look at data—to represent or encode
data. For instance, a color image can be encoded in the RGB format (red-green-blue) or
in the HSV format (hue-saturation-value): these are two different representations of the
same data. Some tasks that may be difficult with one representation can become easy
with another. For example, the task "select all red pixels in the image" is simpler in the
RBG format, whereas "make the image less saturated" is simpler in the HSV format.
Machine-learning models are all about finding appropriate representations for their input
data—transformations of the data that make it more amenable to the task at hand, such as
a classification task.
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Let’s make this concrete. Consider an x axis, a y axis, and some points represented by
their coordinates in the (x, y) system, as shown in figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 Some sample data

As you can see, we have a few white points and a few black points. Let’s say we want
to develop an algorithm that can take the coordinates (x, y) of a point and output whether
that point is likely to be black or to be white. In this case,

The inputs are the coordinates of our points.


The expected outputs are the colors of our points.
A way to measure whether our algorithm is doing a good job could be, for instance, the
percentage of points that are being correctly classified.

What we need here is a new representation of our data that cleanly separates the white
points from the black points. One transformation we could use, among many other
possibilities, would be a coordinate change, illustrated in figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 Coordinate change

In this new coordinate system, the coordinates of our points can be said to be a new
representation of our data. And it’s a good one! With this representation, the black/white
classification problem can be expressed as a simple rule: black points are such that x 0 or
"white points are such that x < 0". This new representation basically solves the
classification problem.
In this case, we defined the coordinate change by hand. But if instead we tried
systematically searching for different possible coordinate changes, and used as feedback
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the percentage of points being correctly classified, then we would be doing machine
learning. Learning, in the context of machine learning, describes an automatic search
process for better representations.
All machine-learning algorithms consist of automatically finding such
transformations that turn data into more useful representations for a given task. These
operations can be coordinate changes, as you just saw, or linear projections (which may
destroy information), translations, nonlinear operations (such as select all points such that
x 0), and so on. Machine-learning algorithms aren’t usually creative in finding these
transformations; they’re merely searching through a predefined set of operations, called a
hypothesis space.
So that’s what machine learning is, technically: searching for useful representations
of some input data, within a predefined space of possibilities, using guidance from some
feedback signal. This simple idea allows for solving a remarkably broad range of
intellectual tasks, from speech recognition to autonomous car driving.
Now that you understand what we mean by learning, let’s take a look at what makes
deep learning special.

1.1.4 The "deep" in deep learning


Deep learning is a specific subfield of machine learning: a new take on learning
representations from data that puts an emphasis on learning successive layers of
increasingly meaningful representations. The deep in deep learning isn’t a reference to
any kind of deeper understanding achieved by the approach; rather, it stands for this idea
of successive layers of representations. How many layers contribute to a model of the
data is called the depth of the model. Other appropriate names for the field could have
been layered representations learning and hierarchical representations learning. Modern
deep learning often involves tens or even hundreds of successive layers of
representation—and they’re all learned automatically from exposure to training data.
Meanwhile, other approaches to machine learning tend to focus on learning only one or
two layers of representation of the data; hence they’re sometimes called shallow learning
.
In deep learning, these layered representations are (almost always) learned via models
called neural networks, structured in literal layers stacked one after the other. The term
neural network is a reference to neurobiology, but although some of the central concepts
in deep learning were developed in part by drawing inspiration from our understanding of
the brain, deep learning models are not models of the brain. There’s no evidence that the
brain implements anything like the learning mechanisms used in modern deep-learning
models. You may come across pop-science articles proclaiming that deep learning works
like the brain or was modeled after the brain, but that isn’t the case. It would be
confusing and counterproductive for newcomers to the field to think of deep learning as
being in any way related to the neurobiology; you don’t need that shroud of "just like our

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minds" mystique and mystery, and you may as well forget anything you may have read
about hypothetical links between deep learning and biology. For our purposes, deep
learning is a mathematical framework for learning representations from data.
What do the representations learned by a deep-learning algorithm look like? Let’s
examine how a network several layers deep (see figure 1.5) transforms an image of a
digit in order to recognize what digit it is.

Figure 1.5 A deep neural network for digit classification

As you can see in figure 1.6, the network transforms the digit image into
representations that are increasingly different from the original image and increasingly
informative about the final result. You can think of a deep network as a multistage
information-distillation operation, where information goes through successive filters and
comes out increasingly purified (that is, useful with regard to some task).

Figure 1.6 Deep representations learned by a digit-classification model

So that’s what deep learning is, technically: a multistage way to learn data
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representations. It’s a simple idea—but, as it turns out, very simple mechanisms,


sufficiently scaled, can end up looking like magic.

1.1.5 Understanding how deep learning works, in three figures


At this point, you know that machine learning is about mapping inputs (such as images)
to targets (such as the label "cat"), which is done by observing many examples of input
and targets. You also know that deep neural networks do this input-to-target mapping via
a deep sequence of simple data transformations (layers) and that these data
transformations are learned by exposure to examples. Now let’s look at how this learning
happens, concretely.
The specification of what a layer does to its input data is stored in the layer’s weights,
which in essence are a bunch of numbers. In technical terms, we’d say that the
transformation implemented by a layer is parametrized by its weights (see figure 1.7).
(Weights are also sometimes called the parameters of a layer.) In this context, learning
means finding a set of values for the weights of all layers in a network, such that the
network will correctly map example inputs to their associated targets. But here’s the
thing: a deep neural network can contain tens of millions of parameters. Finding the
correct value for all of them may seem like a daunting task, especially given that
modifying the value of one parameter will affect the behavior of all others!

Figure 1.7 A neural network is parametrized by its weights.

To control something, first you need to be able to observe it. To control the output of
a neural network, you need to be able to measure how far this output is from what you
expected. This is the job of the loss function of the network, also called the objective
function. The loss function takes the predictions of the network and the true target (what
you wanted the network to output) and computes a distance score, capturing how well the
network has done on this specific example (see figure 1.8).

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Figure 1.8 A loss function measures the quality of the network’s output.

The fundamental trick in deep learning is to use this score as a feedback signal to
adjust the value of the weights a little, in a direction that will lower the loss score for the
current example (see figure 1.9). This adjustment is the job of the optimizer, which
implements what’s called the backpropagation algorithm: the central algorithm in deep
learning. The next chapter will explain in more detail how backpropagation works.

Figure 1.9 The loss score is used as a feedback signal to adjust the weights.

Initially, the weights of the network are assigned random values, so the network
merely implements a series of random transformations. Naturally, its output is far from
what it should ideally be, and the loss score is accordingly very high. But with every
example the network processes, the weights are adjusted a little in the correct direction,
and the loss score decreases. This is the training loop, which, repeated a sufficient
number of times (typically tens of iterations over thousands of examples), yields weight
values that minimize the loss function. A network with a minimal loss is one for which
the outputs are as close as they can be to the targets: a trained network. Once again, a
simple mechanism that, once scaled, ends up looking like magic.

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1.1.6 What deep learning has achieved so far


Although deep learning is a fairly old subfield of machine learning, it only rose to
prominence in the early 2010s. In the few years since, it has achieved nothing short of a
revolution in the field, with remarkable results on perceptual problems such as seeing and
hearing—problems involving skills that seem natural and intuitive to humans but have
long been elusive for machines.
In particular, deep learning has achieved the following breakthroughs, all in
historically difficult areas of machine learning:

Near-human-level image classification


Near-human-level speech recognition
Near-human-level handwriting transcription
Improved machine translation
Improved text-to-speech conversion
Digital assistants such as Google Now and Amazon Alexa
Near-human-level autonomous driving
Improved ad targeting, as used by Google, Baidu, and Bing
Improved search results on the Web
Ability to answer natural-language questions
Superhuman Go playing

We’re still exploring the full extent of what deep learning can do. We’ve started
applying it to a wide variety of problems outside of machine perception and
natural-language understanding, such as formal reasoning. If successful, this may herald
an age where deep learning assists humans in doing science, developing software, and
more.

1.1.7 Don’t believe the short-term hype


Although deep learning has led to remarkable achievements in recent years, expectations
for what the field will be able to achieve in the next decade tend to run much higher than
what will turn out to be possible. Although some world-changing applications like
autonomous cars are already within reach, many more are likely to remain elusive for a
long time, such as believable dialogue systems, human-level machine translation across
arbitrary languages, and human-level natural-language understanding. In particular, talk
of human-level general intelligence shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The risk with high
expectations for the short term is that, as technology fails to deliver, research investment
will dry up, slowing progress for a long time.
This has happened before. Twice in the past, AI went through a cycle of intense
optimism followed by disappointment and skepticism, with a dearth of funding as a
result. It started with symbolic AI in the 1960s. In those early days, projections about AI
were flying high. One of the best-known pioneers and proponents of the symbolic AI
approach was Marvin Minsky, who claimed in 1967, "Within a generation … the
problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved." Three years later,
in 1970, he made a more precisely quantified prediction: "In from three to eight years we
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will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being." In 2016,
such an achievement still appears to be far in the future—so far that we have no way to
predict how long it will take—but in the 1960s and early 1970s, several experts believed
it to be right around the corner (as do many people today). A few years later, as these
high expectations failed to materialize, researchers and government funds turned away
from the field, marking the start of the first AI winter (a reference to a nuclear winter,
because this was shortly after the height of the Cold War).
It wouldn’t be the last one. In the 1980s, a new take on symbolic AI, expert systems,
started gathering steam among large companies. A few initial success stories triggered a
wave of investment, with corporations around the world starting their own in-house AI
departments to develop expert systems. Around 1985, companies were spending over $1
billion each year on the technology; but by the early 1990s, these systems had proven
expensive to maintain, difficult to scale, and limited in scope, and interest died down.
Thus began the second AI winter.
We may be currently witnessing the third cycle of AI hype and disappointment—and
we’re still in the phase of intense optimism. It’s best to moderate our expectations for the
short term and make sure people less familiar with the technical side of the field have a
clear idea of what deep learning can and can’t deliver.

1.1.8 The promise of AI


Although we may have unrealistic short-term expectations for AI, the long-term picture
is looking bright. We’re only just getting started in applying deep learning to many
important problems for which it could prove transformative, from medical diagnoses to
digital assistants. AI research has been moving forward amazingly quickly in the past
five years, in large part due to a level of funding never seen before in the short history of
AI, but so far relatively little of this progress has made its way into the products and
processes that form our world. Most of the research findings of deep learning aren’t yet
applied, or at least not applied to the full range of problems they can solve across all
industries. Your doctor doesn’t yet use AI, and neither does your accountant. You
probably don’t use AI technologies in your day-to-day life. Of course, you can ask your
smartphone simple questions and get reasonable answers, you can get fairly useful
product recommendations on Amazon.com, and you can search for "birthday" on Google
Photos and instantly find those pictures of your daughter’s birthday party from last
month. That’s a far cry from where such technologies used to stand. But such tools are
still only accessory to our daily lives. AI has yet to transition to being central to the way
we work, think, and live.
Right now, it may seem hard to believe that AI could have a large impact on our
world, because it isn’t yet widely deployed—much as, back in 1995, it would have been
difficult to believe in the future impact of the internet. Back then, most people didn’t see
how the internet was relevant to them and how it was going to change their lives. The
same is true for deep learning and AI today. But make no mistake: AI is coming. In a
not-so-distant future, AI will be your assistant, even your friend; it will answer your
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questions, help educate your kids, and watch over your health. It will deliver your
groceries to your door and drive you from point A to point B. It will be your interface to
an increasingly complex and increasingly information-intensive world. And, even more
important, AI will help humanity as a whole move forward, by assisting human scientists
in new breakthrough discoveries across all scientific fields, from genomics to
mathematics.
On the way, we may face a few setbacks and maybe a new AI winter—in much the
same way the internet industry was overhyped in 1998–1999 and suffered from a crash
that dried up investment throughout the early 2000s. But we’ll get there eventually. AI
will end up being applied to nearly every process that makes up our society and our daily
lives, much like the internet today.
Don’t believe the short-term hype, but do believe in the long-term vision. It may take
a while for AI to be deployed to its true potential—a potential the full extent of which no
one has yet dared to dream—but AI is coming, and it will transform our world in a
fantastic way.

1.2 Before deep learning: a brief history of machine learning


Deep learning has reached a level of public attention and industry investment never seen
before in the history of AI, but it isn’t the first successful form of machine learning. It’s
safe to say that most of the machine-learning algorithms used in the industry today aren’t
deep-learning algorithms. Deep learning isn’t always the right tool for the
job—sometimes there isn’t enough data for deep learning to be applicable, and
sometimes the problem is better solved by a different algorithm. If deep learning is your
first contact with machine learning, then you may find yourself in a situation where all
you have is the deep-learning hammer, and every machine-learning problem starts to
look like a nail. The only way not to fall into this trap is to be familiar with other
approaches and practice them when appropriate.
A detailed discussion of classical machine-learning approaches is outside of the scope
of this book, but we’ll briefly go over them and describe the historical context in which
they were developed. This will allow us to place deep learning in the broader context of
machine learning and better understand where deep learning comes from and why it
matters.

1.2.1 Probabilistic modeling


Probabilistic modeling is the application of the principles of statistics to data analysis. It
was one of the earliest forms of machine learning, and it’s still widely used to this day.
One of the best-known algorithms in this category is the Naive Bayes algorithm.
Naive Bayes is a type of machine-learning classifier based on applying the Bayes
theorem while assuming that the features in the input data are all independent (a strong,
or "naive" assumption, which is where the name comes from). This form of data analysis
predates computers and was applied by hand decades before its first computer

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implementation (most likely dating back to the 1950s). The Bayes theorem and the
foundations of statistics date back to the 18th century, and these are all you need to start
using Naive Bayes classifiers.
A closely related model is the logistic regression (logreg for short), which is
sometimes considered to be the "hello world" of modern machine learning. Don’t be
misled by its name—logreg is a classification algorithm rather than a regression
algorithm. Much like Naive Bayes, logreg predates computing by a long time, yet it’s
still useful to this day, thanks to its simple and versatile nature. It’s often the first thing a
data scientist will try on a dataset to get a feel for the classification task at hand.

1.2.2 Early neural networks


Early iterations of neural networks have been completely supplanted by the modern
variants covered in these pages, but it’s helpful to be aware of how deep learning
originated. Although the core ideas of neural networks were investigated in toy forms as
early as the 1950s, the approach took decades to get started. For a long time, the missing
piece was an efficient way to train large neural networks. This changed in the mid 1980s,
when multiple people independently rediscovered the backpropagation algorithm—a
way to train chains of parametric operations using gradient-descent optimization (later in
the book, we’ll precisely define these concepts)--and started applying it to neural
networks.
The first successful practical application of neural nets came in 1989 from Bell Labs,
when Yann LeCun combined the earlier ideas of convolutional neural networks and
backpropagation, and applied them to the problem of classifying handwritten digits. The
resulting network, dubbed LeNet, was used by the United States Postal Service in the
1990s to automate the reading of ZIP codes on mail envelopes.

1.2.3 Kernel methods


As neural networks started to gain some respect among researchers in the 1990s, thanks
to this first success, a new approach to machine learning rose to fame and quickly sent
neural nets back to oblivion: kernel methods. Kernel methods are a group of classification
algorithms, the best known of which is the support vector machine (SVM). The modern
formulation of an SVM was developed by Vladimir Vapnik and Corinna Cortes in the
early 1990s at Bell Labs and published in 1995,2 although an older linear formulation
was published by Vapnik and Chervonenkis as early as 1963.3
Footnote 2mVladimir Vapnik and Corinna Cortes, "Support-Vector Networks," Machine Learning 20, no.
3 (1995): 273–297.

Footnote 3mVladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis, "A Note on One Class of Perceptrons,"
Automation and Remote Control 25 (1964).

SVMs aim at solving classification problems by finding good decision boundaries


(see figure 1.10) between two sets of points belonging to two different categories. A

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decision boundary can be thought of as a line or surface separating your training data into
two spaces corresponding to two categories. To classify new data points, you just need to
check which side of the decision boundary they fall on.

Figure 1.10 A decision boundary

SVMs proceed to find these boundaries in two steps:

1. The data is mapped to a new high-dimensional representation where the decision


boundary can be expressed as a hyperplane (if the data was two-dimensional, as in figure
1.10, a hyperplane would be a straight line).
2. A good decision boundary (a separation hyperplane) is computed by trying to maximize
the distance between the hyperplane and the closest data points from each class, a step
called maximizing the margin. This allows the boundary to generalize well to new
samples outside of the training dataset.

The technique of mapping data to a high-dimensional representation where a


classification problem becomes simpler may look good on paper, but in practice it’s often
computationally intractable. That’s where the kernel trick comes in (the key idea that
kernel methods are named after). Here’s the gist of it: to find good decision hyperplanes
in the new representation space, you don’t have to explicitly compute the coordinates of
your points in the new space; you just need to compute the distance between pairs of
points in that space, which can be done efficiently using a kernel function. A kernel
function is a computationally tractable operation that maps any two points in your initial
space to the distance between these points in your target representation space, completely
bypassing the explicit computation of the new representation. Kernel functions are
typically crafted by hand rather than learned from data—in the case of an SVM, only the
separation hyperplane is learned.
At the time they were developed, SVMs exhibited state-of-the-art performance on
simple classification problems and were one of the few machine-learning methods
backed by extensive theory and amenable to serious mathematical analysis, making them
well understood and easily interpretable. Because of these useful properties, SVMs
became extremely popular in the field for a long time.
But SVMs proved hard to scale to large datasets and didn’t provide good results for
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perceptual problems such as image classification. Because an SVM is a shallow method,


applying an SVM to perceptual problems requires first extracting useful representations
manually (a step called feature engineering), which is difficult and brittle.

1.2.4 Decision trees, random forests, and gradient boosting machines


Decision trees are flowchart-like structures that let you classify input data points or
predict output values given inputs (see figure 1.11). They’re easy to visualize and
interpret. Decisions trees learned from data began to receive significant research interest
in the 2000s, and by 2010 they were often preferred to kernel methods.

Figure 1.11 A decision tree: the parameters that are learned are the questions about the
data. A question could be, for instance, "Is coefficient 2 in the data higher than 3.5?"

In particular, the Random Forest algorithm introduced a robust, practical take on


decision-tree learning that involves building a large number of specialized decision trees
and then ensembling their outputs. Random forests are applicable to a wide range of
problems—you could say that they’re almost always the second-best algorithm for any
shallow machine-learning task. When the popular machine-learning competition website
Kaggle (kaggle.com) got started in 2010, random forests quickly became a favorite on
the platform—until 2014, when gradient boosting machines took over. A gradient
boosting machine, much like a random forest, is a machine-learning technique based on
ensembling weak prediction models, generally decision trees. It uses gradient boosting, a
way to improve any machine-learning model by iteratively training new models that
specialize in addressing the weak points of the previous models. Applied to decision
trees, the use of the gradient boosting technique results in models that strictly outperform
random forests most of the time, while having similar properties. It may be one of the
best, if not the best, algorithm for dealing with nonperceptual data today. Alongside deep
learning, it’s one of the most commonly used techniques in Kaggle competitions.

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1.2.5 Back to neural networks


Around 2010, although neural networks were almost completely shunned by the
scientific community at large, a number of people still working on neural networks
started to make important breakthroughs: the groups of Geoffrey Hinton at the University
of Toronto, Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal, Yann LeCun at New York
University, and IDSIA in Switzerland.
In 2011, Dan Ciresan from IDSIA began to win academic image-classification
competitions with GPU-trained deep neural networks—the first practical success of
modern deep learning. But the watershed moment came in 2012, with the entry of
Hinton’s group in the yearly large-scale image-classification challenge ImageNet. The
ImageNet challenge was notoriously difficult at the time, consisting of classifying
high-resolution color images into 1,000 different categories after training on 1.4 million
images. In 2011, the top-five accuracy of the winning model, based on classical
approaches to computer vision, was only 74.3%. Then, in 2012, a team led by Alex
Krizhevsky and advised by Geoffrey Hinton was able to achieve a top-five accuracy of
83.6%--a significant breakthrough. The competition has been dominated by deep
convolutional neural networks every year since. By 2015, the winner reached an accuracy
of 96.4%, and the classification task on ImageNet was considered to be a completely
solved problem.
Since 2012, deep convolutional neural networks (convnets) have become the go-to
algorithm for all computer vision tasks; more generally, they work on all perceptual
tasks. At major computer vision conferences in 2015 and 2016, it was nearly impossible
to find presentations that didn’t involve convnets in some form. At the same time, deep
learning has also found applications in many other types of problems, such as natural
language processing. It has completely replaced SVMs and decision trees in a wide range
of applications. For instance, for several years, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, CERN, used decision tree–based methods for analysis of particle data from the
ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); but CERN eventually switched to
Keras-based deep neural networks due to their higher performance and ease of training
on large datasets.

1.2.6 What makes deep learning different


The primary reason deep learning took off so quickly is that it offered better performance
on many problems. But that’s not the only reason. Deep learning also makes
problem-solving much easier, because it completely automates what used to be the most
crucial step in a machine-learning workflow: feature engineering.
Previous machine-learning techniques—shallow learning—only involved
transforming the input data into one or two successive representation spaces, usually via
simple transformations such as high-dimensional non-linear projections (SVM) or
decision trees. But the refined representations required by complex problems generally
can’t be attained by such techniques. As such, humans had to go to great length to make
the initial input data more amenable to processing by these methods: that is, they had to
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manually engineer good layers of representations for their data. This is called feature
engineering. Deep learning, on the other hand, completely automates this step: with deep
learning, you learn all features in one pass rather than having to engineer them yourself.
This has greatly simplified machine-learning workflows, often replacing sophisticated
multistage pipelines with a single, simple, end-to-end deep-learning model.
You may ask, if the crux of the issue is to have multiple successive layers of
representation, could shallow methods be applied repeatedly to emulate the effects of
deep learning? In practice, there are fast-diminishing returns to successive applications of
shallow-learning methods, because the optimal first representation layer in a three-layer
model isn’t the optimal first layer in a one-layer or two-layer model . What is
transformative about deep learning is that it allows a model to learn all layers of
representation jointly, at the same time, rather than in succession (greedily, as it’s called).
With joint feature learning, whenever the model adjusts one of its internal features, all
other features that depend on it automatically adapt to the change, without requiring
human intervention. Everything is supervised by a single feedback signal: every change
in the model serves the end goal. This is much more powerful than greedily stacking
shallow models, because it allows for complex, abstract representations to be learned by
breaking them down into long series of intermediate spaces (layers); each space is only a
simple transformation away from the previous one.
These are the two essential characteristics of how deep learning learns from data: the
incremental, layer-by-layer way in which increasingly complex representations are
developed, and the fact these intermediate incremental representations are learned
jointly, each layer being updated to follow both the representational needs of the layer
above and the needs of the layer below. Together, these two properties have made deep
learning vastly more successful than previous approaches to machine learning.

1.2.7 The modern machine-learning landscape


A great way to get a sense of the current landscape of machine-learning algorithms and
tools is to look at machine-learning competitions on Kaggle. Due to its highly
competitive environment (some contests have thousands of entrants and million-dollar
prizes) and to the wide variety of machine-learning problems covered, Kaggle offers a
realistic way to assess what works and what doesn’t. So, what kind of algorithm is
reliably winning competitions? What tools do top entrants use?
In 2016, Kaggle was dominated by two approaches: gradient boosting machines and
deep learning. Specifically, gradient boosting is used for problems where structured data
is available, whereas deep learning is used for perceptual problems such as image
classification. Practitioners of the former almost always use the excellent XGBoost
library. Meanwhile, most of the Kaggle entrants leveraging deep learning use the Keras
library, due to its ease of use and flexibility. XGBoost and Keras both support the two
most popular data science languages: R and Python.
These are the two techniques you should be the most familiar with in order to be
successful in applied machine learning today: gradient boosting machines, for
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shallow-learning problems; and deep learning, for perceptual problems. In technical


terms, this means you’ll need to be familiar with XGB and Keras—the two libraries that
currently dominate Kaggle competitions. With this book in hand, you’re already one big
step closer.

1.3 Why deep learning? Why now?


The two key ideas of deep learning for computer vision—convolutional neural networks
and backpropagation—were already well understood in 1989. The Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM) algorithm, which is fundamental to deep learning for time series, was
developed in 1997 and has barely changed since. So why did deep learning only take off
after 2012? What changed in these two decades?
In general, three technical forces are driving advances in machine learning:

Hardware
Datasets and benchmarks
Algorithmic advances

Because the field is guided by experimental findings rather than by theory,


algorithmic advances only become possible when appropriate data and hardware were
available to try new ideas (or scale up old ideas, as is often the case). Machine learning
isn’t mathematics or physics, where major advances can be done with a pen and a piece
of paper. It’s an engineering science.
The real bottlenecks throughout the 1990s and 2000s were data and hardware. But
here’s what happened during that time: the internet took off, and high-performance
graphics chips were developed for the needs of the gaming market.

1.3.1 Hardware
Between 1990 and 2010, off-the-shelf CPUs became faster by a factor of approximately
5,000. As a result, nowadays it’s possible to run small deep learning models on your
laptop, whereas this would have been intractable 25 years ago.
But typical deep-learning models used in computer vision or speech recognition
require orders of magnitude more computational power than what your laptop can
deliver. Throughout the 2000s, companies like NVIDIA and AMD have been investing
billions of dollars in developing fast, massively parallel chips (graphical processing units
[GPUs]) to power the graphics of increasingly photorealistic video games—cheap,
single-purpose supercomputers designed to render complex 3D scenes on your screen in
real time. This investment came to benefit the scientific community when, in 2007,
NVIDIA launched CUDA (developer.nvidia.com/about-cuda), a programming interface
for its line of GPUs. A small number of GPUs started replacing massive clusters of CPUs
in various highly parallelizable applications, beginning with physics modeling. Deep
neural networks, consisting mostly of many small matrix multiplications, are also highly

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parallelizable; and around 2011, some researchers began to write CUDA


implementations of neural nets—Dan Ciresan4 and Alex Krizhevsky5 were among the
first.
Footnote 4mSee "Flexible, High Performance Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classification,"
Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2011),
www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/11/Papers/210.pdf.

Footnote 5mSee "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks," Advances in
Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (2012), mng.bz/2286.

What happened is that the gaming market subsidized supercomputing for the next
generation of artificial intelligence applications. Sometimes, big things begin as games.
Today, the NVIDIA Titan X, a gaming GPU that cost $1,000 at the end of 2015, can
deliver a peak of 6.6 TLOPS in single precision: that is, 6.6 trillion float32 operations
per second. That’s about 350 times more than what you can get out of a modern laptop.
On a Titan X, it takes only a couple of days to train an ImageNet model of the sort that
would have won the ILSVRC competition a few years ago. Meanwhile, large companies
train deep-learning models on clusters of hundreds of GPUs of a type developed
specifically for the needs of deep learning, such as the NVIDIA K80. The sheer
computational power of such clusters is something that would never have been possible
without modern GPUs.
What’s more, the deep-learning industry is starting to go beyond GPUs and is
investing in increasingly specialized, efficient chips for deep learning. In 2016, at its
annual I/O convention, Google revealed its tensor processing unit (TPU) project: a new
chip design developed from the ground up to run deep neural networks, which is
reportedly 10 times faster and far more energy efficient than top-of-line GPUs.

1.3.2 Data
AI is sometimes heralded as the new industrial revolution. If deep learning is the steam
engine of this revolution, then data is its coal: the raw material that powers our intelligent
machines, without which nothing would be possible. When it comes to data, in addition
to the exponential progress in storage hardware over the past 20 years (following
Moore’s law), the game changer has been the rise of the internet, making it feasible to
collect and distribute very large datasets for machine learning. Today, large companies
work with image datasets, video datasets, and natural-language datasets that couldn’t
have been collected without the internet. User-generated image tags on Flickr, for
instance, have been a treasure trove of data for computer vision. So are YouTube videos.
And Wikipedia is a key dataset for natural-language processing.
If there’s one dataset that has been a catalyst for the rise of deep learning, it’s the
ImageNet dataset, consisting of 1.4 million images that have been hand-annotated with
1,000 image categories (1 category per image). But what makes ImageNet special isn’t
just its large size, but also the yearly competition associated with it.6

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Footnote 6mThe ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC),


www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC.

As Kaggle has been demonstrating since 2010, public competitions are an excellent
way to motivate researchers and engineers to push the envelope. Having common
benchmarks that researchers compete to beat has greatly helped the recent rise of deep
learning.

1.3.3 Algorithms
In addition to hardware and data, until the late 2000s, we were missing a reliable way to
train very deep neural networks. As a result, neural networks were still fairly shallow,
using only one or two layers of representations; thus they weren’t able to shine against
more refined shallow methods such as SVMs and random forests. The key issue was that
of gradient propagation through deep stacks of layers. The feedback signal used to train
neural networks would fade away as the number of layers increased.
This changed around 2009–2010 with the advent of several simple but important
algorithmic improvements that allowed for better gradient propagation:

Better activation functions for neural layers


Better weight-initialization schemes, starting with layer-wise pretraining, which was
quickly abandoned
Better optimization schemes, such as RMSProp and Adam

Only when these improvements began to allow for training models with 10 or more
layers did deep learning start to shine.
Finally, in 2014, 2015, and 2016, even more advanced ways to help gradient
propagation were discovered, such as batch normalization, residual connections, and
depthwise separable convolutions. Today we can train from scratch models that are
thousands of layers deep.

1.3.4 A new wave of investment


As deep learning became the new state of the art for computer vision in 2012–2013, and
eventually for all perceptual tasks, industry leaders took note. What followed was a
gradual wave of industry investment far beyond anything previously seen in the history
of AI.
In 2011, right before deep learning took the spotlight, the total venture capital
investment in AI was around $19 million, which went almost entirely to practical
applications of shallow machine-learning approaches. By 2014, it had risen to a
staggering $394 million. Dozens of startups launched in these three years, trying to
capitalize on the deep-learning hype. Meanwhile, large tech companies such as Google,
Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft have invested in internal research departments in
amounts that would most likely dwarf the flow of venture-capital money. Only a few
numbers have surfaced: in 2013, Google acquired the deep-learning startup DeepMind
for a reported $500 million—the largest acquisition of an AI company in history. In

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2014, Baidu started a deep-learning research center in Silicon Valley, investing $300
million in the project. The deep-learning hardware startup Nervana Systems was acquired
by Intel in 2016 for over $400 million.
Machine learning—in particular, deep learning—has become central to the product
strategy of these tech giants. In late 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated, "Machine
learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we’re doing
everything. We’re thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads,
YouTube, or Play. And we’re in early days, but you’ll see us—in a systematic
way—apply machine learning in all these areas."
As a result of this wave of investment, the number of people working on deep
learning went in just five years from a few hundred to tens of thousands, and research
progress has reached a frenetic pace. There are currently no signs that this trend will slow
any time soon.

1.3.5 The democratization of deep learning


One the key factors driving this inflow of new faces in deep learning has been the
democratization of the toolsets used in the field. In the early days, doing deep learning
required significant C++ and CUDA expertise, which few people possessed. Nowadays,
basic Python or R scripting skills suffice to do advanced deep-learning research. This has
been driven most notably by the development of Theano and then TensorFlow—two
symbolic tensor-manipulation frameworks that support auto-differentiation, greatly
simplifying the implementation of new models—and by the rise of user-friendly libraries
such as Keras, which makes deep learning as easy as manipulating LEGO bricks. After
its release early 2015, Keras quickly became the go-to deep-learning solution for large
numbers of new startups, grad students, and researchers pivoting into the field.

1.3.6 Will it last?


Is there anything special about deep neural networks that makes them the "right"
approach for companies to be investing in and for researchers to flock to? Or is deep
learning just a fad that may not last? Will we still be using deep neural networks in 20
years?
The short answer is yes—deep learning has several properties that justify its status as
an AI revolution, and it’s here to stay. We may not be using neural networks two decades
from now, but whatever we use will directly inherit from modern deep learning and its
core concepts. These important properties can be broadly sorted into three categories:

Simplicity—Deep learning removes the need for feature engineering, replacing complex,
brittle, engineering-heavy pipelines with simple, end-to-end trainable models that are
typically built using only five or six different tensor operations.
Scalability—Deep learning is highly amenable to parallelization on GPUs or TPUs, so it
can take full advantage of Moore’s law. In addition, deep-learning models are trained by
iterating over small batches of data, allowing them to be trained on datasets of arbitrary
size. (The only bottleneck is the amount of parallel computational power available,
which, thanks to Moore’s law, is a fast-moving barrier.)
Versatility and reusability—Unlike many prior machine-learning approaches,
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deep-learning models can be trained on additional data without restarting from scratch,
making them viable for continuous online learning—an important property for very large
production models. Furthermore, trained deep-learning models are repurposable and thus
reusable: for instance, it’s possible to take a deep-learning model trained for image
classification and drop it into a video-processing pipeline. This allows us to reinvest
previous work into increasingly complex and powerful models. This also makes deep
learning applicable to fairly small datasets.

Deep learning has only been in the spotlight for a few years, and we haven’t yet
established the full scope of what it can do. With every passing month, we learn about
new use cases and engineering improvements that lift previous limitations. Following a
scientific revolution, progress generally follows a sigmoid curve: it starts with a period of
fast progress, which gradually stabilizes as researchers hit hard limitations, and then
further improvements become incremental. Deep learning in 2017 seems to be in the first
half of that sigmoid, with much more progress to come in the next few years.

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23

Before we begin: the mathematical


blocks of neural networks

This chapter covers

A first example of a neural network


2
Tensors and tensor operations
How neural networks learn, via backpropagation and gradient descent

Understanding deep learning requires familiarity with many simple mathematical


concepts: tensors, tensor operations, differentiation, gradient descent, and so on. Our goal
in this chapter will be to build your intuition about these notions without getting overly
technical. In particular, we’ll steer away from mathematical notation, which can be
off-putting for those without any mathematics background and isn’t strictly necessary to
explain things well.
To add some context for tensors and gradient descent, we’ll begin the chapter with a
practical example of a neural network. Then we’ll go over every new concept that’s been
introduced, point by point. Keep in mind that these concepts will be essential for you to
understand the practical examples that will come in the following chapters!
After reading this chapter, you’ll have an intuitive understanding of how neural
networks work, and you’ll be able to move on to practical applications—which will start
with chapter 3.

2.1 A first look at a neural network


Let’s look at a concrete example of a neural network that uses the Keras R package to
learn to classify hand-written digits. Unless you already have experience with Keras or
similar libraries, you will not understand everything about this first example right away.
You probably haven’t even installed Keras yet. Don’t worry, that is perfectly fine. In the
next chapter, we will review each element in our example and explain them in detail. So
don’t worry if some steps seem arbitrary or look like magic to you! We’ve got to start
somewhere.
The problem we’re trying to solve here is to classify grayscale images of handwritten
digits (28 pixels by 28 pixels) into their 10 categories (0 to 9). We’ll use the MNIST
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24

dataset, a classic dataset in the machine-learning community, which has been around
almost as long as the field itself and has been intensively studied. It’s a set of 60,000
training images, plus 10,000 test images, assembled by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (the NIST in MNIST) in the 1980s. You can think of
"solving" MNIST as the "Hello World" of deep learning—it’s what you do to verify that
your algorithms are working as expected. As you become a machine- learning
practitioner, you’ll see MNIST come up over and over again, in scientific papers, blog
posts, and so on. You can see some MNIST samples in figure 2.1.

SIDEBAR Note on classes and labels


In machine learning, a category in a classification problem is called a class.
Data points are called samples. The class associated with a specific sample
is called a label.

Figure 2.1 MNIST sample digits

You don’t need to try to reproduce this example on your machine just now. If you
wish to, you’ll first need to set up Keras, which is covered in section 3.3.
The MNIST dataset comes preloaded in Keras, in the form of train and test lists,
each of which includes a set of images (x) and associated labels (y):

Listing 2.1 Loading the MNIST dataset in Keras

library(keras)

mnist <- dataset_mnist()


train_images <- mnist$train$x
train_labels <- mnist$train$y
test_images <- mnist$test$x
test_labels <- mnist$test$y

train_images and train_labels form the training set, the data that the model will
learn from. The model will then be tested on the test set, test_images and test_labels
. The images are encoded as as 3D arrays, and the labels are a 1D array of digits, ranging
from 0 to 9. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the images and the labels.
The R str() function is a convenient way to get a quick glimpse at the structure of
an array. Let’s use it to have a look at the training data:

> str(train_images)
int [1:60000, 1:28, 1:28] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
> str(train_labels)
int [1:60000(1d)] 5 0 4 1 9 2 1 3 1 4 ...

And here’s the test data:


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> str(test_images)
int [1:10000, 1:28, 1:28] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
> str(test_labels)
int [1:10000(1d)] 7 2 1 0 4 1 4 9 5 9 ...

The workflow will be as follows: first we’ll feed the neural network the training data,
train_images and train_labels. The network will then learn to associate images and
labels. Finally, we’ll ask the network to produce predictions for test_images, and we’ll
verify whether these predictions match the labels from test_labels.
Let’s build the network—again, remember that you aren’t supposed to understand
everything about this example yet.

Listing 2.2 The network architecture

network <- keras_model_sequential() %>%


layer_dense(units = 512, activation = "relu", input_shape = c(28 * 28)) %>%
layer_dense(units = 10, activation = "softmax")

If you aren’t familliar with the pipe (%>%) operator used to invoke methods on the
network object fear not, we’ll cover this when we review this example again towards the
end of this chapter. For now, read it in your head as "then" (e.g. start with a model, then
add a layer, then add another layer, etc.).
The core building block of neural networks is the layer, a data-processing module that
you can think of as a filter for data. Some data comes in, and it comes out in a more
useful form. Specifically, layers extract representations out of the data fed into
them—hopefully representations that are more meaningful for the problem at hand. Most
of deep learning consists of chaining together simple layers that will implement a form of
progressive data distillation. A deep-learning model is like a sieve for data processing,
made of a succession of increasingly refined data filters—the layers.
Here our network consists of a sequence of two layers, which are densely connected
(also called fully connected) neural layers. The second (and last) layer is a 10-way
softmax layer, which means it will return an array of 10 probability scores (summing to
1). Each score will be the probability that the current digit image belongs to one of our 10
digit classes.
To make the network ready for training, we need to pick three more things, as part of
the compilation step:

A loss function—How the network will be able to measure how good a job it’s doing on
its training data, and thus how it will be able to steer itself in the right direction.
An optimizer—The mechanism through which the network will update itself based on the
data it sees and its loss function.
Metrics to monitor during training and testing—Here we’ll only care about accuracy (the
fraction of the images that were correctly classified).

The exact purpose of the loss function and the optimizer will be made clear

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