Chapter 4. Neural Networks

In this chapter, we will get an overview on neural networks. We will see what a simple shallow neural network is and get some familiarity with how they work. We will do this by trying to identify the genre of a song using a shallow neural network. We will also recall our previous work on the spam detector to use the neural network. Further on, we will take a look at larger neural networks, known as deep learning, and apply what is known as a convolutional neural network to identify handwritten mathematical symbols. Finally we will revisit the bird species identifier covered previously and use deep learning to produce a much more accurate identifier.

The topics that we will be covering in this chapter are as follows:

• Understanding neural networks
• Identifying the genre of a song using neural networks
• Recalling our work on the spam detector to use neural networks