Book Image

Deep Learning with fastai Cookbook

By : Mark Ryan
Book Image

Deep Learning with fastai Cookbook

By: Mark Ryan

Overview of this book

fastai is an easy-to-use deep learning framework built on top of PyTorch that lets you rapidly create complete deep learning solutions with as few as 10 lines of code. Both predominant low-level deep learning frameworks, TensorFlow and PyTorch, require a lot of code, even for straightforward applications. In contrast, fastai handles the messy details for you and lets you focus on applying deep learning to actually solve problems. The book begins by summarizing the value of fastai and showing you how to create a simple 'hello world' deep learning application with fastai. You'll then learn how to use fastai for all four application areas that the framework explicitly supports: tabular data, text data (NLP), recommender systems, and vision data. As you advance, you'll work through a series of practical examples that illustrate how to create real-world applications of each type. Next, you'll learn how to deploy fastai models, including creating a simple web application that predicts what object is depicted in an image. The book wraps up with an overview of the advanced features of fastai. By the end of this fastai book, you'll be able to create your own deep learning applications using fastai. You'll also have learned how to use fastai to prepare raw datasets, explore datasets, train deep learning models, and deploy trained models.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Chapter 1: Getting Started with fastai

Over the last decade, deep learning has revolutionized swathes of technology, from image recognition to machine translation. Until recently, only those with extensive training and access to specialized hardware have been able to unlock the benefits of deep learning. The fastai framework is an effort to democratize deep learning by making it accessible to non-specialists. One of the key ways that fastai opens up deep learning to the masses is by making it easy to get started.

In this chapter, we will show you what you need to get started with fastai, starting with how to set up an environment for fastai. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following: set up a cloud environment in which to run fastai examples; exercise a basic fastai example; explain the relationship between fastai and PyTorch (the underlying deep learning library for fastai); and contrast fastai with Keras, the other high-level library for deep learning.

...