Building an NN model in PyTorch

So far in this chapter, you have learned about the basic utility components of PyTorch for manipulating tensors and organizing data into formats that we can iterate over during training. In this section, we will finally implement our first predictive model in PyTorch. As PyTorch is a bit more flexible but also more complex than machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn, we will start with a simple linear regression model.

The PyTorch neural network module (torch.nn)

torch.nn is an elegantly designed module developed to help create and train NNs. It allows easy prototyping and the building of complex models in just a few lines of code.

To fully utilize the power of the module and customize it for your problem, you need to understand what it’s doing. To develop this understanding, we will first train a basic linear regression model on a toy dataset without using any features from the torch.nn module; we will use nothing but the...