Image recognition tutorial in R using deep convolutional neural networks (MXNet package)

This is a detailed tutorial on image recognition in R using a deep convolutional neural network provided by the MXNet package. After a short post I wrote some times ago I received a lot of requests and emails for a much more detailed explanation, therefore I decided to write this tutorial. This post will show a reproducible example on how to get 97.5% accuracy score on a faces recognition task in R.

Plain vanilla recurrent neural networks in R: waves prediction

While continuing my study of neural networks and deep learning, I inevitably meet up with recurrent neural networks.

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are a particular kind of neural networks usually very good at predicting sequences due to their inner working. If your task is to predict a sequence or a periodic signal, then using a RNN might be a good starting point. Plain vanilla RNN work fine but they have a little problem when trying to “keep in memory” events occured, say for instance, more than 20 steps back. The solution to this problem has been addressed with the development of a model called LSTM network. As far as I know, LSTM should usually be preferred to a plain vanilla RNN when possible as it yields better results.