Deep Learning in a Nutshell: Sequence Learning

This series of blog posts aims to provide an intuitive and gentle introduction to deep learning that does not rely heavily on math or theoretical constructs. Everything in life depends on time and therefore, represents a sequence. To perform machine learning with sequential data (text, speech, video, etc.) we could use a regular neural network and feed it the entire sequence, but the input size of our data would be fixed, which is quite limiting. Other problems with this approach occur if important events in a sequence lie just outside of the input window. What we need is (1) a network to which we can feed sequences of arbitrary length one element of the sequence per time step (for example a video is just a sequence of images; we feed the network one image at a time); and (2) a network which has some kind of memory to remember important events which happened many time steps in the past.