5.1. Deep Learning

The brain is capable of impressive problem-solving capabilities. It is then unsurprising that an entire field of machine learning, called deep learning, has been inspired by the workings of the brain. This field is called deep learning because its models are significantly more complex than traditional machine learning models and are built using many layers (we’ll see this later). The more layers there are, the deeper and more complicated the model is.

The brain is a very complicated organ, but its main purpose is to take information from all of our sensors and draw understanding to make decisions.

In deep learning, we try to get computers to ‘think’ the same way our brains do, but computers don’t have the same senses that we do. Computers typically receive and process information using numbers. Thus in deep learning, the idea is to build an artificial brain that can draw understanding or make decisions based on numerical data.

We call these artificial ‘brains’ neural networks (NNs).