GRU, LSTM, + more modern deep learning, machine learning, and data science for sequences

Like the course I just released on Hidden Markov Models, Recurrent Neural Networks are all about learning sequences – but whereas Markov Models are limited by the Markov assumption, Recurrent Neural Networks are not – and as a result, they are more expressive, and more powerful than anything we’ve seen on tasks that we haven’t made progress on in decades.

So what’s going to be in this course and how will it build on the previous neural network courses and Hidden Markov Models?

In the first section of the course we are going to add the concept of time to our neural networks.

I’ll introduce you to the Simple Recurrent Unit, also known as the Elman unit.

We are going to revisit the XOR problem, but we’re going to extend it so that it becomes the parity problem – you’ll see that regular feedforward neural networks will have trouble solving this problem but recurrent networks will work because the key is to treat the input as a sequence.

In the next section of the course, we are going to revisit one of the most popular applications of recurrent neural networks – language modeling.

You saw when we studied Markov Models that we could do things like generate poetry and it didn’t look too bad. We could even discriminate between 2 different poets just from the sequence of parts-of-speech tags they used.

In this course, we are going to extend our language model so that it no longer makes the Markov assumption.