Theano - Introduction

Have you developed Machine Learning models in Python? Then, obviously you know the intricacies in developing these models. The development is typically a slow process taking hours and days of computational power.

The Machine Learning model development requires lot of mathematical computations. These generally require arithmetic computations especially large matrices of multiple dimensions. These days we use Neural Networks rather than the traditional statistical techniques for developing Machine Learning applications. The Neural Networks need to be trained over a huge amount of data. The training is done in batches of data of reasonable size. Thus, the learning process is iterative. Thus, if the computations are not done efficiently, training the network can take several hours or even days. Thus, the optimization of the executable code is highly desired. And that is what exactly Theano provides.

Theano is a Python library that lets you define mathematical expressions used in Machine Learning, optimize these expressions and evaluate those very efficiently by decisively using GPUs in critical areas. It can rival typical full C-implementations in most of the cases.

Theano was written at the LISA lab with the intention of providing rapid development of efficient machine learning algorithms. It is released under a BSD license.

In this tutorial, you will learn to use Theano library.