Convolutional Neural Networks in R

Last time I promised to cover the graph-guided fused LASSO (GFLASSO) in a subsequent post. In the meantime, I wrote a GFLASSO R tutorial for DataCamp that you can freely access here, so give it a try! The plan here is to experiment with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a form of deep learning. CNNs underlie most advanced recognition algorithms used by the major tech giants. The recent development of back-end optimization tools and hardware (from Intel, NVIDIA and Google to name a few) now enables training CNNs on conventional laptop machines, hence accessible to a broader audience. Today you will construct a binary classifier that can distinguish between dogs and cats from a set of 25,000 pictures, using the Keras R interface powered by the TensorFlow back-end engine.