Deep Learning in R – R Blog

Deep learning is a recent trend in machine learning that models highly non-linear representations of data. In the past years, deep learning has gained a tremendous momentum and prevalence for a variety of applications (Wikipedia 2016a). Among these are image and speech recognition, driverless cars, natural language processing and many more. Interestingly, the majority of mathematical concepts for deep learning have been known for decades. However, it is only through several recent developments that the full potential of deep learning has been unleashed (Nair and Hinton 2010; Srivastava et al. 2014). Previously, it was hard to train artificial neural networks due to vanishing gradients and overfitting problems.