Deep Learning Is Easy – Learn Something Harder
I think the article overestimates how much we understand about neural networks, and the novel ways we might use them.Take word2vec for example. It's a two-layer (i.e. not deep) neural network that uses a relatively simple training algorithm. Yet, after 30 minutes it can learn impressive relationships between English words. The method is only 3 years old and businesses continue to find novel ways to apply word2vec. Check out this article:http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2015/03/11/word-is-w...They are using word2vec to find clothing items that resemble other products by adding or subtracting descriptors such as "stripes", "blue", or even "pregnant."For my company, we are attempting to normalize medical terminology using word2vec. Here are a couple examples:1. "myocardial" + "infarction" = "MI"2. "ring" + "finger" = "fourth" + "metacarpal"We never would have thought to normalize the names of different body parts, but with word2vec, it does it for us. There's a great deal yet to learn about how this model alone works, let alone deeper networks.