A year ago, I would have no idea what this was about. I'm very thankful that I live in a world where I can take high quality classes from Coursera that have given me the foundation to at least understand the abstract. :)
I struggle with the mathematics used in neural networks. I can understand code but as soon as I start to see calculus my brain freezes over. Does anyone know of a good online course that can give me a crash course in the mathematics required for neural networks?
My CS bachelors covered this, but I was lazy and drank too much beer. Now 20 years later I want to understand it properly.
I've taken Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class, Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class, Dan Jurafsky and Christopher Manning's Natural Language Processing class, and currently Geoff Hinton's Neural Networks class.
I have spent a lot of time on Khan Academy to learn the calculus. In my experience you can get by with a surprisingly small amount of calculus, but it happens to be a small amount from a high level.
For example, backpropagation is just repeated application of the chain rule. Did take a while to get a handle on the derivatives, but it's worth it.
Do the theano deep learning tutorials. And keep hacking away at the math--you need it, but it eventually sinks in and becomes reasonably intuitive. Starting with code helped me grasp the math (I'm also much more comfortable reading code than math).
I struggle with the mathematics used in neural networks. I can understand code but as soon as I start to see calculus my brain freezes over. Does anyone know of a good online course that can give me a crash course in the mathematics required for neural networks?
My CS bachelors covered this, but I was lazy and drank too much beer. Now 20 years later I want to understand it properly.