2017-08

The secret behind deep learning is not really a secret. It is function optimisation. What a neural network essentially does, is optimising a function. In this episode I illustrate a number of optimisation methods and explain which one is the best and why.

Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, reaching state-of-the-art results in several fields like image recognition and speech processing. More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual data in order to deal with natural language, and there too with promising results. In this episode I explain why is deep learning performing the way it does, and what are some of the most tedious causes of failure.