Introducing Pytorch for fast.ai
I get the motivation behind fast.ai's lessons, but I question whether it's the right approach. Their goal is to make deep learning accessible to programmers by reducing the mathematical background required. An analogous situation is the engineer who uses Autodesk to design car parts: He/she may not need to know the detailed implementation of the 3D graphics to use the software effectively.<p>The difference is that Autodesk relies on a mature, <i>deterministic</i> technology (3D graphics rendering). Deep learning is a stochastic process that depends on the data and the model. The training code, and especially the framework hooks, is the <i>least</i> important part. The example they give is three lines of code to train a cat vs. dog classifier. I've tried this classifier on a different binary image classification task: livers with and without tumors. It didn't work very well. There's lots of reasons: little variability between images, grey-scale images, different resolutions, etc. You can tweak the network, throw in more middle layers, try different kinds of layers, whatever, to get better results. All of that is guesswork if you don't understand what the CNN is doing at each stage. At this point in time you <i>do</i> need a formal education in linear algebra, calculus and statistics to investigate why a model does/does not work. It's not enough to know how to use the libraries.<p>On the flipside, you <i>also</i> need to know how to manipulate data and parse it into the correct format. This generally requires a year or two of programming practice in a good scripting language like Python. I will echo their thoughts that Ian Goodfellow's Deep Learning Book is remarkably lacking in this area. As a simple example, you cannot even use AlexNet without pre-processing your images to be 227x227 or 224x224 for GoogleNet. That's 10,000 images resized, labeled and loaded into the model before training can take place.<p>tl;dr IMHO in terms of being a competent user of deep learning: mathematics >= programming >>> knowing how to use a framework