An RNN is one powerful model from the deep learning family that has shown incredible results in the last five years. It aims to make predictions on sequential data by utilizing a powerful memory-based architecture.

But how is it different from a standard neural network? A normal (also called feedforward) neural network acts like a mapping function, where a single input is associated with a single output. In this architecture, no two inputs share knowledge and the each moves in only one direction—starting from the input nodes, passing through hidden nodes, and finishing at the output nodes. Here is an illustration of the aforementioned model:

On the contrary, a recurrent (also called feedback) neural network uses an additional memory state. When an input A₁ (word I) is added, the network produces an output B₁ (word love) and stores information about the input A₁ in the memory state. When the next input A₂ (word love) is added, the network produces the associated output B₂ (word to) with the help of the memory state. Then, the memory state is updated using information from the new input A₂. This operation is repeated for each input:

You can see how with this method our predictions depend not only on the current input, but also on previous data. This is the reason why RNNs are the state-of-the-art model for dealing with sequences. Let's illustrate this with some examples.

A typical use case for the feedforward architecture is image recognition. We can see its application in agriculture for analyzing plants, in healthcare for diagnosing diseases, and in driverless cars for detecting pedestrians. Since no output in any of these examples requires specific information from a previous input, the feedforward network is a great fit for such problems.

There is also another set of problems, which are based on sequential data. In these cases, predicting the next element in the sequence depends on all the previous elements. The following is a list of several examples:

• Translating text to speech
• Predicting the next word in a sentence
• Converting audio to text
• Language translation
• Captioning videos

RNNs were first introduced in the 1980s with the invention of the Hopfield network. Later, in 1997, Hochreiter and Schmidhuber proposed an advanced RNN model called long short-term memory (LSTM). It aims to solve some major issues with the simplest recurrent neural network model, which we will reveal later in the chapter. A more recent improvement to the RNN family was presented in 2014 by Chung et al. This new architecture, called Gated Recurrent Unit, solves the same problem as LSTM but in a simpler manner.

In the next chapters of this book, we will go over the aforementioned models and see how they work and why researchers and large companies are using them on a daily basis to solve fundamental problems.

In recent years, RNNs, similarly to any neural network model, have become widely popular due to the easier access to large amounts of structured data and increases in computational power. But researchers have been solving sequence-based problems for decades with the help of other methods, such as the Hidden Markov Model. We will briefly compare this technique to an RNNs and outline the benefits of both approaches.

The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a probabilistic sequence model that aims to assign a label (class) to each element in a sequence. HMM computes the probability for each possible sequence and picks the most likely one.

Both the HMM and RNN are powerful models that yield phenomenal results but, depending on the use case and resources available, RNN can be much more effective.

The following are the pros and cons of a Hidden Markov Model when solving sequence-related tasks:

• Pros: Less complex to implement, works faster and as efficiently as RNNs on problems of medium difficulty.
• Cons: HMM becomes exponentially expensive with the desire to increase accuracy. For example, predicting the next word in a sentence may depend on a word from far behind. HMM needs to perform some costly operations to obtain this information. That is the reason why this model is not ideal for complex tasks that require large amounts of data.

The following are the pros and cons of a recurrent neural network when solving sequence-related tasks:

• Pros: Performs significantly better and is less expensive when working on complex tasks with large amounts of data.
• Cons: Complex to build the right architecture suitable for a specific problem. Does not yield better results if the prepared data is relatively small.

As a result of our observations, we can state that RNNs are slowly replacing HMMs in the majority of real-life applications. One ought to be aware of both models, but with the right architecture and data, RNNs often end up being the better choice.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in learning more about hidden Markov models, I strongly recommend going through some video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPRoLreU9lA) and papers of example applications, such as Introduction to Hidden Markov Models by Degirmenci (Harvard University) (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adegirmenci/files/hmm_adegirmenci_2014.pdf) or Issues and Limitations of HMM in Speech Processing: A Survey (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8463/dfee2b46fa813069029149e8e80cec95659f.pdf).

With the use of a memory state, the RNN architecture perfectly addresses every sequence-based problem. In this section of the chapter, we will go over a full explanation of how this works. You will obtain knowledge about the general characteristics of a neural network as well as what makes RNNs special. This section emphasizes on the theoretical side (including mathematical equations), but I can assure you that once you grasp the fundamentals, any practical example will go smoothly.

To make the explanations understandable, let's discuss the task of generating text and, in particular, producing a new chapter based on one of my favorite book series, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.

At the highest level, a neural network, which solves supervised problems, works as follows:

1. Obtain training data (such as images for image recognition or sentences for generating text)
2. Encode the data (neural networks work with numbers so a numeric representation of the data is required)
3. Build the architecture of your neural network model
4. Train the model until you are satisfied with the results
5. Evaluate your model by making a fresh new prediction

Let's see how these steps are applied for an RNN.

For the problem of generating a new book chapter based on the book series The Hunger Games, you can extract the text from all books in The Hunger Games series (The Hunger Games, Mockingjay, and Catching Fire) by copying and pasting it. To do that, you need to find the books, content online.

We use word embeddings (https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/06/word-embeddings-count-word2veec/) for this purpose. Word embedding is a collective name of all techniques where words or phrases from a vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers. Some methods include one-hot encoding, word2vec, and GloVe. You will learn more about them in the forthcoming chapters.

Each neural network consists of three sets of layers—input, hidden, and output. There is always one input and one output layer. If the neural network is deep, it has multiple hidden layers:

The difference between an RNN and the standard feedforward network comes in the cyclical hidden states. As seen in the following diagram, recurrent neural networks use cyclical hidden states. This way, data propagates from one time step to another, making each one of these steps dependent on the previous:

A common practice is to unfold the preceding diagram for better and more fluent understanding. After rotating the illustration vertically and adding some notations and labels, based on the example we picked earlier (generating a new chapter based on The Hunger Games books), we end up with the following diagram:

This is an unfolded RNN with one hidden layer. The identically looking sets of (input + hidden RNN unit + output) are actually the different time steps (or cycles) in the RNN. For example, the combination of  + RNN +  illustrates what is happening at time step  . At each time step, these operations perform as follows:

1. The network encodes the word at the current time step (for example, t-1) using any of the word embedding techniques and produces a vector  (The produced vector can be  or  depending on the specific time step)
2. Then, , the encoded version of the input word I at time step t-1, is plugged into the RNN cell (located in the hidden layer). After several equations (not displayed here but happening inside the RNN cell), the cell produces an output  and a memory state . The memory state is the result of the input  and the previous value of that memory state . For the initial time step, one can assume that  is a zero vector
3. Producing the actual word (volunteer) at time step t-1 happens after decoding the output  using a text corpus specified at the beginning of the training 
4. Finally, the network moves multiple time steps forward until reaching the final step where it predicts the word

You can see how each one of {…, , , , …} holds information about all the previous inputs. This makes RNNs very special and really good at predicting the next unit in a sequence. Let's now see what mathematical equations sit behind the preceding operations.

All the magic in this model lies behind the RNN cells. In our simple example, each cell presents the same equations, just with a different set of variables. A detailed version of a single cell looks like this:

First, let's explain the new terms that appear in the preceding diagram:

• Weights (, , ): A weight is a matrix (or a number) that represents the strength of the value it is applied to. For example, determines how much of the input should be considered in the following equations.
  If  consists of high values, then should have significant influence on the end result. The weight values are often initialized randomly or with a distribution (such as normal/Gaussian distribution). It is important to be noted that  ,  ,  and  are the same for each step. Using the backpropagation algorithm, they are being modified with the aim of  producing accurate predictions

• Biases (, ): An offset vector (different for each layer), which adds a change to the value of the output 
• Activation function (tanh): This determines the final value of the current memory state  and the output . Basically, the activation functions map the resultant values of several equations similar to the following ones into a desired range: (-1, 1) if we are using the tanh function, (0, 1) if we are using sigmoid function, and (0, +infinity) if we are using ReLu (https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/5493/what-is-the-purpose-of-an-activation-function-in-neural-networks)

Now, let's go over the process of computing the variables. To calculate  and , we can do the following:

As you can see, the memory state  is a result of the previous value  and the input . Using this formula helps in retaining information about all the previous states.

The input  is a one-hot representation of the word volunteer. Recall from before that one-hot encoding is a type of word embedding. If the text corpus consists of 20,000 unique words and volunteer is the 19th word, then  is a 20,000-dimensional vector where all elements are 0 except the one at the 19^th position, which has a value of 1, which suggests that we only taking into account this particular word.

The sum between , , and  is passed to the tanh activation function, which squashes the result between -1 and 1 using the following formula:

In this, e = 2.71828 (Euler's number) and z is any real number.

The output  at time step t is calculated using  and the softmax function. This function can be categorized as an activation with the exception that its primary usage is at the output layer when a probability distribution is needed. For example, predicting the correct outcome in a classification problem can be achieved by picking the highest probable value from a vector where all the elements sum up to 1. Softmax produces this vector, as follows:

Once an assumption for the next word in the sequence is made, we need to assess how good this prediction is. To do that, we need to compare the predicted word  with the actual word from the training data (let's call it  ). This operation can be accomplished using a loss (cost) function. These types of functions aim to find the error between predicted and actual values. Our choice will be the cross-entropy loss function, which looks like this:

Since we are not going to give a detailed explanation of this formula, you can treat it as a black box. If you are curious about how it works, I recommend reading the article Improving the way neural networks work by Michael Nielson (http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap3.html#introducing_the_cross-entropy_cost_function). A useful thing to know is that the cross-entropy function performs really well on classification problems.

After computing the error, we came to one of the most complex and, at the same time, powerful techniques in deep learning, called backpropagation.

In simple terms, we can state that the backpropagation algorithm traverses backward through all (or several) time steps while updating the weights and biases of the network. After repeating this procedure, and a certain amount of training steps, the network learns the correct parameters and will be able to yield better predictions.

After each training step, we can see that the value from the loss function decreases. Once it crosses a certain threshold, we can state that the network has successfully learned to predict new words in the text.

The last step is to generate the new chapter. This can happen by choosing a random word as a start (such as: games) and then predicting the next words using the preceding formulas with the pre-trained weights and biases. Finally, we should end up with somewhat meaningful text.

Hopefully, now you have a good understanding of how a recurrent neural network works. Unfortunately, this simple model fails to make good predictions on longer and complex sequences. The reason behind this lies in the so-called vanishing/exploding gradient problem that prevents the network from learning efficiently.

As you already know, the training process updates the weights and biases using the backpropagation algorithm. Let's dive one step further into the mathematical explanations. In order to know how much to adjust the parameters (weights and biases), the network computes the derivative of the loss function (at each time step) with respect to the current value of these parameters. When this operation is done for multiple time steps with the same set of parameters, the value of the derivative can become too large or too small. Since we use it to update the parameters, a large value can result in undefined weights and biases and a small value can result in no significant update, and thus no learning.

This issue was first addressed by Bengio et al. in 1994, which led to an introduction of the LSTM network with the aim of solving the vanishing/exploding gradient problem. Later in the book, we will reveal how LSTM does this in an excellent fashion. Another model, which also overcomes this challenge, is the gated recurrent unit. In Chapter 3, Generating Your Own Book Chapter, you will see how this is being done.

In this chapter, we introduce the recurrent neural network model using theoretical explanations together with a particular example. The aim is to grasp the fundamentals of this powerful system so you can understand the programming exercises better. Overall, the chapter included the following:

• A brief introduction to RNNs
• The difference between RNNs and other popular models
• Illustrating the use of RNNs through an example
• The main problems with a standard RNN

In the next chapter, we will go over our first practical exercise using recurrent neural networks. You will get to know the popular TensorFlow library, which makes it easy to build machine learning models. The next section will give you a nice first hands-on experience and prepare you for solving more difficult problems.

• Andrew Ng's deep learning course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkDaE6sCZn6Ec-XTbcX1uRg2_u4xOEky0
• Hidden Markov model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPRoLreU9lA
• Introduction to Hidden Markov Models by Degirmenci: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adegirmenci/files/hmm_adegirmenci_2014.pdf
• Issues and Limitations of HMM in Speech Processing: A Survey: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8463/dfee2b46fa813069029149e8e80cec95659f.pdf
•  Words embeddings: https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/06/word-embeddings-count-word2veec/ and https://towardsdatascience.com/word-embeddings-exploration-explanation-and-exploitation-with-code-in-python-5dac99d5d795
• Understanding activation functions: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/5493/what-is-the-purpose-of-an-activation-function-in-neural-networks
• Improving the way neural networks work by Michael Nielson: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap3.html#introducing_the_cross-entropy_cost_function
• Lecture 8 from the course, Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning by Stanford University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keqep_PKrY8
• On the difficulty of training recurrent neural networks: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v28/pascanu13.pdf