The Extreme Learning Machine — Some believe that the Extreme Learning Machine is one of the smartest neural network inventions ever created — so much so that there’s even a conference dedicated exclusively to the study of ELM neural network architectures. Proponents of ELMs argue that it can perform standard tasks at exponentially faster training…

Beautiful Plots Are Never Created in One Line of Code — All images created by author. Modern plotting libraries in Python are a godsend to data scientists, who can create complex data representations with one line of code (plus a few more to load the libraries and data). …

The intuition behind an ingenious algorithm — Here’s a function: f(x). It’s expensive to calculate, not necessarily an analytic expression, and you don’t know its derivative. Your task: find the global minima. This is, for sure, a difficult task, one more difficult than other optimization problems within machine learning. Gradient descent, for one, has access to a…

Two general perspectives and some psychology — When one first encounters machine learning, one often rushes through algorithm after algorithm, technique after technique, equation after equation. But it is afterwards that one can reflect on the general trends across the knowledge that they have acquired. What it means to ‘learn’ is a very abstract concept. The goal…

From Francois Chollet: “On the Measure of Intelligence” — Throughout history, the measure of intelligence has been changed wildly to adapt to shifting thought and attitudes towards different groups of people and animals. In recent decades, the possibility of intelligence is being extended towards machines. Many have attempted to articulate criteria of intelligence in terms of language: there is…

The significance of the data distribution — A lot of discourse around deep learning would have you believe that more data is better. This is a fairly intuitive idea. Data represents the ‘real world’ in some capacity, and models training on such data learn a sampled representation of this ‘real world’. …

Moving beyond classical conceptions of what tabular data can be — Deep learning has become the public and private face of Artificial Intelligence. When one talks casually about Artificial Intelligence with friends at a party, strangers on the street, and colleagues at work, it is almost always on the exciting models which generate language, create art, synthesize music, and so on…

No-Hassle Deep Learning Model Compression — I was asked to write a review for Nota AI’s NetsPresso Compression Toolkit (NPTK). If you’re not familiar with NPTK, you can read an introduction to it and the compression methods it supports here. I was struck by the ease of using Nota’s compression toolkit to compress models. Rather than…

Nota’s (Free) NetsPresso Compression Toolkit — You’ve worked hard to build a deep learning model that performs well. Now it’s time to take it out of the massive GPU centers and into the standard everyday devices it’ll be used on. Let’s see how it performs! [System crashed] Uh-oh! Your model is too big. “Dammit,” you groan…