On Sep 25, 2013, at 5:43 AM, Robert Kern <robert.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2013-09-24 19:03, Michael Lamport Commons wrote: >> Dear Members of this list-serve: >> >> Would it be possible to build “stacked neural networks” like the one >> shown in the attached document? >> >> You may have a few questions about the stacked neural network. For >> example, what is a stacked neural network? What is the difference between >> stacked neural networks and the existing neural network? A brief description >> is provided in the attached document. >> >> Based on this brief description, I would like to know how would one >> go about building such stacked neural networks cheaply and easily? Is there >> any software available that can do this? How much would it cost? >> >> Please feel free to contact me if you think that it would be possible >> or easier to apply stacked neural network into a more practical field? >> Suggestions are welcome as well. > > The term of art for these kind of architectures is "deep learning" (and > associated terms like "deep architecture", "deep networks", etc.). It's an > active field of research that is showing promising preliminary results, and > we are beginning to see its limits as well. Google and other big machine > learning players are putting a lot of resources into building these systems. > > http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209v3.pdf > > A good resource would be the Deep Learning Tutorial which shows you how to > build these systems using Theano, a Python package for computing with GPUs, > one that is particularly well-suited to building deep neural networks. > > http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/ > > Unfortunately, there is nothing cheap or easy about deep networks. They are > *very* computationally expensive. You will probably need a small cluster of > GPUs to solve interesting problems, and training one will probably take a > couple of days of computation (for the final run, *after* you have debugged > your code and done the initial experiments to find all of the right > hyperparameters for your problem). > > Good luck! > > -- > Robert Kern The OP might also want to look at Nvidia's CUDO units (which package GPUs into massive parallel accelerators - currently well over 2500 GPUs in a single fat card) and PyCUDA which makes the CUDA software available to python. -Bill -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
