Book Image

Hands-On Neural Network Programming with C#

By : Matt Cole
Book Image

Hands-On Neural Network Programming with C#

By: Matt Cole

Overview of this book

Neural networks have made a surprise comeback in the last few years and have brought tremendous innovation in the world of artificial intelligence. The goal of this book is to provide C# programmers with practical guidance in solving complex computational challenges using neural networks and C# libraries such as CNTK, and TensorFlowSharp. This book will take you on a step-by-step practical journey, covering everything from the mathematical and theoretical aspects of neural networks, to building your own deep neural networks into your applications with the C# and .NET frameworks. This book begins by giving you a quick refresher of neural networks. You will learn how to build a neural network from scratch using packages such as Encog, Aforge, and Accord. You will learn about various concepts and techniques, such as deep networks, perceptrons, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, and autoencoders. You will learn ways to add intelligent features to your .NET apps, such as facial and motion detection, object detection and labeling, language understanding, knowledge, and intelligent search. Throughout this book, you will be working on interesting demonstrations that will make it easier to implement complex neural networks in your enterprise applications.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
Activation Function Timings

Our example

So now that we have covered some basics for both CNTK and LSTM, it’s time to dive into our example application. You can find this project with the code that accompanies this book. Make sure you have it open in Microsoft Visual Studio before proceeding. You can follow the instructions in the upcoming The Code section if you need further instructions.

The example we are creating uses Microsoft CNTK as a back-end and will use a simple sine wave as our function. The sine wave was plotted earlier and is used due to it’s being widely familiar to most individuals.

Here are screenshots of what our example application looks like:

Main page – training data

The preceding screenshot shows our main screen, displaying our sine wave data points, our training data. The goal is to get our training data (blue) to match the red as closely as possible in shape, as...