The key differences between shallow learning and deep learning models:
Shallow learning models:
◆ Most of them are simple and require less hyper-parametrization
◆ They need the features to be pre-extracted
◆ They are best suited for tabular datasets
◆ Their architectural changes are very limited.
◆ They don't require huge computation resources
◆ Their results are interpretable than deep learning models
◆ Because of the limit in their design change, there are little researches going on in these models.
Example of shallow learning models:
◆Linear and logistic regression
◆Support vector machines
◆Decision trees
◆Random forests
◆K-Nearest neighbors
Deep learning models:
◆ They are flexible in design. You can stack neural networks layers the way you like.
◆ They have many hyper-parameters and are hard to tune, but with tools like Keras Tuner, it's possible to get over it.
◆ They can extract features in data themselves
◆ They are best suited for complex problems. Often in problems that involve perception and language. Like object detection, image recognition, sentiment analysis, machine translation, etc...
◆ They require a huge amount of data and compute resources
◆ Their predictions are hard to interpret. Some say that interpreting them is nearly impossible.
◆ Because of their flexible design, there is a lot of space for researches.
Neural networks are hard to train. The more they go deeper, the more they are likely to suffer from unstable gradients.
Gradients can either explode or vanish, and either of those can cause the network to give poor results.
A short thread on the neuralnets training issues
The vanishing gradients problem results in the network taking too long to train(learning will be very slow), and the exploding gradients cause the gradients to be very large.
Although those problems are nearly inevitable, the choice of activation function can reduce their effects.
Using ReLU activation in the first layers can help avoid vanishing gradients.
Careful weight initialization can also help, but ReLU is by far the good fix.
Machine learning is the science of teaching the computer to do certain tasks, where instead of hardcoding it, we give it the data that contains what we want to achieve, and its job is to learn from such data to find the patterns that map what we want to achieve and provided data.
These patterns or (learned) rules can be used to make predictions on unseen data.
A machine learning model is nothing other than a mathematical function whose coefficient and intercept hold the best (or learned) values representing the provided data & what we want to achieve.
In ML terms, coefficients are weights, intercepts are biases.
Getting started with machine learning can be hard.
We are fortunate to have many & freely available learning resources, but most of them won't help because they skip the fundamentals or start with moonshots.
This is a thread on learning machine learning & structured resources.
1. Get excited first
The first step to learning a hard topic is to get excited.
Machine learning is a demanding field and it will take time to start understanding concepts & connecting things.
If you find it hard to understand what ML really is,
@lmoroney I/O 19 talk will get you excited. He introduces what machine learning really is from a programming perspective.