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)

Setting up a fastai environment in Paperspace Gradient

There are two free cloud environments that you can use to explore fastai: Paperspace Gradient and Google Colab. In this section, we'll go through the steps to set up Paperspace Gradient with a fastai notebook environment, and in the next section, we'll go through the setup steps for Colab. It's your choice, so pick the environment that works best for you.

Gradient is simpler to use because you have access to a standard filesystem for storage. With Colab, you need to use Google Drive for storage and, unlike Gradient, you don't have convenient access to the terminal for command-line interactions.

On the other hand, Colab gives you direct access to a wider set of libraries beyond those needed for fastai—for example, you can run the Keras MNIST example in Colab but it won't work off the shelf in a Gradient fastai instance. To get the most out of the examples in the book, it's best to set...