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 Google Colab

If you are already familiar with the Google Colab environment or want to take advantage of Google's overall machine learning ecosystem, Colab may be the right environment for you to use to explore fastai. In this section, we'll go through the steps to get set up with Colab and validate that it's ready for you to use with fastai.

Getting ready

To use Colab, you will need a Google ID and access to Google Drive. If you don't already have a Google ID, follow the instructions here to create one: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en.

Once you have a Google ID, you need to confirm that you have access to Google Drive. You need access to Drive because it acts as the storage system for Colab. You save your notebooks and data in Drive when you are working in Colab. Follow the instructions here to get access to Drive: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2424384?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl...