Building Neural Networks from Scratch

In this mini-book, you will(hopefully) learn about different neural network structures. By the end of the book, I hope you also will have a solid conceptual understanding of how neural networks function.

I will briefly go through some necessary formulas and equations, but will mainly stick to broad definitions that are comprehendible to even middle school students(I’ll try!). Some topics are well beyond those taught in middle school, so you may want to look at more thorough and step-by-step walkthroughs on the topics on platforms like Khan Academy. As you go through this book, you will also encounter several different projects and real-world problems that I will walk you through and solve. I highly recommend you take a try at solving them beforehand! Solutions that I give may not be the best and most state-of-the-art, so you can also try and tweak it a bit to make it better! I will try to add some optimizations to the code to make it faster and more efficient and give you a summary of what state-of-the-art methods data scientists now use. All code in this book is either pseudocode or written in Java, so you should be able to roughly interpret it if you have learned any C-like programming languages! You don’t need to learn one right away to continue reading either… I provide detailed explanations of each line of code. You can also find it all on GitHub (with this book).