Theano is a Python library originally developed by James Bergstra at the University of Montreal. It aims at providing more expressive ways to write mathematical functions with symbolic representations (F. Bastien, P. Lamblin, R. Pascanu, J. Bergstra, I. Goodfellow, A. Bergeron, N. Bouchard, D. Warde-Farley and Y. Bengio. Theano: new features and speed improvements. NIPS 2012 Deep Learning Workshop). Interestingly, Theano is named after the Greek mathematician, who may have been Pythagoras' wife. It's strongest points are fast c-compiled computations, symbolic expressions, and GPU computation, and Theano is under active development. Improvements are made regularly with new features. Theano's implementations are much wider than scalable machine learning so I will narrow down and use Theano for deep learning. Visit the Theano website for more information—http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/.
When we want to perform more complex computations on multidimensional matrices, basic NumPy will resort to costly loops and iterations driving up the CPU load as we have seen earlier. Theano aims to optimize these computations by compiling them into highly optimized C-code and, if possible, utilizing the GPU. For neural networks and deep learning, Theano has the useful capability to automatically differentiate mathematical functions, which is very convenient for calculation of the partial derivatives when using algorithms such as backpropagation.
Currently, Theano is used in all sorts of deep learning projects and has become the most used platform in this field. Lately, new packages have been built on top of Theano in order to make utilizing deep learning functionalities easier for us. Considering the steep learning curve of Theano, we will use packages built on Theano, such as theanets, pylearn2, and Lasagne.
