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 3: Training Models with Tabular Data

In the previous chapter, we learned how to ingest various kinds of datasets using fastai and how to clean up datasets. In this chapter, we are going to get into the details of training a model with fastai using tabular data. Tabular data, which is data organized in rows and columns that you would find in a spreadsheet file or a database table, is critical to most businesses. The fastai framework acknowledges the importance of tabular data by providing a full suite of features to support deep learning applications based on tabular data.

To explore deep learning with tabular data in fastai, we will return to the ADULT_SAMPLE dataset, one of the datasets we examined in Chapter 2, Exploring and Cleaning Up Data with fastai. By using this dataset, we will train a deep learning model, while also learning about the TabularDataLoaders (used to define the training and test datasets) and tabular_learner (used to define and train the model) objects...