Understanding Deep Learning

Draft
The history of deep learning is unusual in science. The perseverance of a small cabal of scientists, working over twenty-five years in a seemingly unpromising area, has revolution-ized a field and dramatically impacted society.This text is primarily about the ideas that underlie deep learning. The first part of the book introduces deep learning models and discusses how to train them, measure their performance, and improve this performance.The next part considers architectures that are specialized to images, text, and graph data. These chapters require only introductory linear algebra, calculus, and probability and should be accessible to any second-year undergraduate in a quantitative discipline.Subsequent parts of the book tackle generative models and reinforcement learning. These chapters require more knowledge of probability and calculus and target more advanced students.