Hi. I'm August.
I'm a deep learning enthusiast with broad interests in ML research and engineering.
I like to understand and explain challenging concepts in the scientific literature, and I enjoy translating abstract theoretical ideas into code. This blog is an excuse for me to do both.
Feel free to reach out if you'd like to say hi 😊
Of all the stunning advancements in deep learning made in the last 10 years, the progress in the field of computer vision is perhaps the most striking. At the heart of this progress is a model known as a convolutional neural network – or “CNN” for short – which resembles the structure of the brain’s visual cortex and has become a staple of almost all computer vision systems today.
In this final post of the series, we will see how to apply backpropagation to the neural net we built in the last chapter. This will allow our network to incrementally improve itself as it gets exposed to new data, which will ultimately enable it to classify the MNIST test set with close to 95% accuracy.
By now, we have covered a whole lot of material. We have talked about decision boundaries, loss functions, and gradient descent, and we have built our own linear models using the perceptron and logistic regression algorithms. In this penultimate post of the series, we will analyze the first half of a neural network — the forward pass — and we will use linear algebra to explore a visual interpretation of what happens to our data as it flows through a neural net.
In the previous post, we saw how the perceptron algorithm automatically discovered how to distinguish data points belonging to two different classes. This time, we will explore the ideas behind another algorithm — logistic regression — to see how and why it plays a central role in many neural network architectures. We will also demonstrate how it can be used to model slightly more complex and interesting data than the Iris dataset.
Building a neural network is fairly easy. It doesn’t require you to know any obscure programming language, and you can build a working model with surprisingly few lines of code. To understand how it works however — to really understand it — takes mathematical insight more than anything else. While this may sound lofty, anyone with a firm grasp of high school level math is equipped to take on the task.