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

Creating a network

Using the ConvNetSharp framework, there are three ways in which to create a neural network. First, we can use the Core.Layers or Flow.Layers objects to create a convolutional network (with or without a computational graph), as shown in the following diagram:

Alternatively, we can create a computational graph like the following:

Example 1 – a simple example

Let's take a look at our first example. This is a minimal example in which we will define a two-layer neural network and train it on a single data point. We are intentionally making this example verbose so that we can walk through each step together to improve our understanding:

var net = new Net<double>();

The InputLayer variable declares...