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)

Contrasting fastai with Keras

In this section, we'll cover some of the similarities and differences between fastai and Keras. While both frameworks provide high-level APIs for deep learning, there are some significant differences between them in terms of their architecture and approach to the problem, as well as differences between the communities using each. By contrasting these two frameworks, you will get a clearer idea of the strengths of fastai and be better prepared for the detailed examinations of fastai applications that are coming in subsequent chapters.

Getting ready

If you have used Keras recently, then you'll be in good shape to benefit from this section. If you haven't used Keras before, or it's been a while since you've used it, I recommend that you take a brief look at this tutorial so that you have a fresh overview of Keras: https://keras.io/getting_started/intro_to_keras_for_engineers/.

How to do it…

In this section, we will...