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

Neural networks in R


We will build several neural networks in this section. First, we will use the neuralnet package to create a neural network model that we can visualize. We will also use the nnet and RSNNS (Bergmeir, C., and Benítez, J. M. (2012)) packages. These are standard R packages and can be installed by the install.packages command or from the packages pane in RStudio. Although it is possible to use the nnet package directly, we are going to use it through the caret package, which is short for Classification and Regression Training. The caret package provides a standardized interface to work with many machine learning (ML) models in R, and also has some useful features for validation and performance assessment that we will use in this chapter and the next.

For our first examples of building neural networks, we will use the MNIST dataset, which is a classic classification problem: recognizing handwritten digits based on pictures. The data can be downloaded from the Apache MXNet site...