rasbt/python-machine-learning-book

That's an interesting question, and I try to answer this in a very general way. In essence, deep learning offers a set of techniques and algorithms that help us to parameterize deep neural network structures -- artificial neural networks with many hidden layers and parameters. One of the key ideas behind deep learning is to extract high level features from the given dataset. Thereby, deep learning aims to overcome the challenge of the often tedious feature engineering task and helps with parameterizing traditional neural networks with many layers. Now, to introduce deep learning, let us take a look at a more concrete example involving multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs).