The Importance of Deep Learning

If you have been working in the field of data science – or Artificial Intelligence (AI), as it is called nowadays – for a few years, you might have noticed the recent sudden explosion of scholarly and practitioner articles about successful solutions based on deep learning techniques.

The big breakthrough happened in 2012 when the deep learning-based AlexNet network won the ImageNet challenge by an unprecedented margin. This victory kicked off a surge in the usage of deep learning networks. Since then, these have expanded to many different domains and tasks.

So, what are we referring to exactly when we talk about deep learning? Deep learning covers a subset of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, most of which stem from neural networks. Deep learning is indeed the modern evolution of traditional neural networks. Apart from the classic feedforward, fully connected, backpropagation-trained, and multilayer perceptron architectures, deeper...