Book Image

R Deep Learning Projects

Book Image

R Deep Learning Projects

Overview of this book

R is a popular programming language used by statisticians and mathematicians for statistical analysis, and is popularly used for deep learning. Deep Learning, as we all know, is one of the trending topics today, and is finding practical applications in a lot of domains. This book demonstrates end-to-end implementations of five real-world projects on popular topics in deep learning such as handwritten digit recognition, traffic light detection, fraud detection, text generation, and sentiment analysis. You'll learn how to train effective neural networks in R—including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and LSTMs—and apply them in practical scenarios. The book also highlights how neural networks can be trained using GPU capabilities. You will use popular R libraries and packages—such as MXNetR, H2O, deepnet, and more—to implement the projects. By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of deep learning concepts and techniques and how to use them in a practical setting.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

What is so exciting about recurrent neural networks?


Coming from a mathematics background, in my rather hectic career I have seen many different trends, particularly during the last few years, which all sound very similar to me: "you have a problem? wavelets can save you!", "finite elements are the solution to everything", and similar over-enthusiastic claims. 

Of course, each tool has its time and place and, more importantly, an application domain where it excels. I find recurrent neural networks quite interesting for the many features they can achieve:

  • Produce consistent markup text (opening and closing tags, recognizing timestamp-like data)
  • Write Wikipedia articles with references, and create URLs from non-existing addresses, by learning what a URL should look like
  • Create credible-looking scientific papers from LaTeX

All these amazing features are possible without the network having any context information or metadata. In particular, without knowing English, nor what a URL or a bit of LaTeX...