Book Image

Neural Networks with R

By : Balaji Venkateswaran, Giuseppe Ciaburro
Book Image

Neural Networks with R

By: Balaji Venkateswaran, Giuseppe Ciaburro

Overview of this book

Neural networks are one of the most fascinating machine learning models for solving complex computational problems efficiently. Neural networks are used to solve wide range of problems in different areas of AI and machine learning. This book explains the niche aspects of neural networking and provides you with foundation to get started with advanced topics. The book begins with neural network design using the neural net package, then you’ll build a solid foundation knowledge of how a neural network learns from data, and the principles behind it. This book covers various types of neural network including recurrent neural networks and convoluted neural networks. You will not only learn how to train neural networks, but will also explore generalization of these networks. Later we will delve into combining different neural network models and work with the real-world use cases. By the end of this book, you will learn to implement neural network models in your applications with the help of practical examples in the book.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 5. Training and Visualizing a Neural Network in R

As seen in Chapters 1, Neural Network and Artificial Intelligence Concepts, and Chapter 2, Learning Process in Neural Networks, training a neural network model forms the basis for building a neural network.

Feed-forward and backpropagation are the techniques used to determine the weights and biases of the model. The weights can never be zero but the biases can be zero. To start with, the weights are initialized a random number, and by gradient descent, the errors are minimized; we get a set of best possible weights and biases for the model.

Once the model is trained using any of the R functions, we can pass on the independent variables to predict the target or unknown variable. In this chapter, we will use a publicly available dataset to train, test, and visualize a neural network model. The following items will be covered:

  • Training, testing, and evaluating a dataset using NN model
  • Visualizing the NN model
  • Early stopping
  • Avoiding overfitting...