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

Finding Optimal Parameters

In this chapter, we will use the open source package SwarmOps, version 4.0, to help you better understand how you can use this tool to find optimal parameters for your functions. You can get the latest version of SwarmOps from the following location: https://github.com/mattcolefla/SwarmOps.

Once again, we must spend a little time on theory, where we will take you back to your academic days and lay a foundation so that we are all speaking the same language. It should be noted that SwarmOps is a highly research-oriented tool and should be used as such. We have worked hard to make this product open source, and the latest version has over 60 different optimization functions for you to use.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Fitness function
  • Constraints
  • Meta-optimization
  • Optimization methods
  • Parallelism

Ready? Here we go!

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