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)

Understanding the world in four applications: tables, text, recommender systems, and images

In their seminal paper describing fastai, Howard and Gugger (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.04688.pdf) describe the four application areas that fastai supports out of the box. In this section, we will go through these four applications of deep learning that fastai directly supports: tabular data, text data, recommender systems, and computer vision. The MNIST example that you saw in the previous section is an example of a computer vision application. The MNIST example included the following:

  • Curated dataset: MNIST. You can find an overall list of curated datasets here:

    https://course.fast.ai/datasets

  • Easy ingestion of the curated dataset via untar_data()
  • Image-specific handling of the dataset via a data loader object
  • Definition of an image-specific model structure via a Learner object
  • Utilities to examine the dataset

Similarly, fastai also provides components specifically...