Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and NLP
This the second part of the Recurrent Neural Network Tutorial. The first part is here.
Code to follow along is on Github.
In this part we will implement a full Recurrent Neural Network from scratch using Python and optimize our implementation using Theano, a library to perform operations on a GPU. The full code is available on Github. I will skip over some boilerplate code that is not essential to understanding Recurrent Neural Networks, but all of that is also on Github.
Get the code: The full code is available as an Jupyter/iPython Notebook on Github!
In a previous blog post we build a simple Neural Network from scratch. Let’s build on top of this and speed up our code using the Theano library. With Theano we can make our code not only faster, but also more concise!
Theano describes itself as a Python library that lets you to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions, especially ones with multi-dimensional arrays. The way I understand Theano is that it allows me to define graphs of computations. Under the hood Theano optimizes these computations in a variety of ways, including avoiding redundant calculations, generating optimized C code, and (optionally) using the GPU. Theano also has the capability to automatically differentiate mathematical expressions. By modeling computations as graphs it can calculate complex gradients using the chain rule. This means we no longer need to compute the gradients ourselves!
Continue reading “Speeding up your Neural Network with Theano and the GPU”