Book Image

Deep Learning with R for Beginners

By : Mark Hodnett, Joshua F. Wiley, Yuxi (Hayden) Liu, Pablo Maldonado
Book Image

Deep Learning with R for Beginners

By: Mark Hodnett, Joshua F. Wiley, Yuxi (Hayden) Liu, Pablo Maldonado

Overview of this book

Deep learning has a range of practical applications in several domains, while R is the preferred language for designing and deploying deep learning models. This Learning Path introduces you to the basics of deep learning and even teaches you to build a neural network model from scratch. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll explore deep learning libraries and understand how to create deep learning models for a variety of challenges, right from anomaly detection to recommendation systems. The Learning Path will then help you cover advanced topics, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), transfer learning, and large-scale deep learning in the cloud, in addition to model optimization, overfitting, and data augmentation. Through real-world projects, you’ll also get up to speed with training convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) in R. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be well-versed with deep learning and have the skills you need to implement a number of deep learning concepts in your research work or projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Getting ready


In this chapter, we will introduce keras and tensorflow for R. keras is a model-level building, in that it provides a high-level interface to quickly develop deep learning models. Instead of implementing low-level operations such as convolutions and tensor products, it relies on Theano, TensorFlow or CNTK in the backend, and according to the development team, more backends would be supported in the future. 

Why do you need a backend? Well, if the computation becomes more complicated, which is often the case in deep learning, you need to use different computation methods (known as computation graphs) and hardware (GPUs). For instructional purposes, all our sample codes run without GPU. 

Installing Keras and TensorFlow for R

As per the official documentation, you can install Keras simply with:

devtools::install_github("rstudio/keras")

The Keras R interface uses tensorflow as a backendengine by default. To install both the core keras library and tensorflow, then do:

library(keras)
install_keras...