An Intuitive Guide to LSTMs

LSTMs are one of the most important breakthroughs in machine learning; Giving machine learning algorithms the ability to recall past information, allows for the realization of temporal patterns. How better to understand a concept, than to create it from scratch? LSTM stands for Long short-term memory, denoting its ability to use past information to make predictions. The mechanism behind the LSTM is quite simple. Instead of a single feedforward process for the data to be propagated through, LSTMs have different sources of processed information, from different timesteps as inputs for the networks, therefore being able to access time-related patterns within the data.