On 2013-09-24 19:03, Michael Lamport Commons wrote:
Dear Members of this list-serve:
Would it be possible to build “stacked neural networks” like the one
shown in the attached document?
You may have a few questions about the stacked neural network. For
example, what is a stacked neural network? What is the difference between
stacked neural networks and the existing neural network? A brief description is
provided in the attached document.
Based on this brief description, I would like to know how would one go
about building such stacked neural networks cheaply and easily? Is there any
software available that can do this? How much would it cost?
Please feel free to contact me if you think that it would be possible
or easier to apply stacked neural network into a more practical field?
Suggestions are welcome as well.
The term of art for these kind of architectures is "deep learning" (and
associated terms like "deep architecture", "deep networks", etc.). It's an
active field of research that is showing promising preliminary results, and we
are beginning to see its limits as well. Google and other big machine learning
players are putting a lot of resources into building these systems.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209v3.pdf
A good resource would be the Deep Learning Tutorial which shows you how to build
these systems using Theano, a Python package for computing with GPUs, one that
is particularly well-suited to building deep neural networks.
http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/
Unfortunately, there is nothing cheap or easy about deep networks. They are
*very* computationally expensive. You will probably need a small cluster of GPUs
to solve interesting problems, and training one will probably take a couple of
days of computation (for the final run, *after* you have debugged your code and
done the initial experiments to find all of the right hyperparameters for your
problem).
Good luck!
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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