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...

We will mainly be working with two KNIME products: KNIME Analytics Platform and KNIME Server. KNIME Analytics Platform includes ML and deep learning algorithms and data operations needed for data science projects. KNIME Server, on the other hand, provides the IT infrastructure for easy and secure deployment, as well as model monitoring over time.

We'll concentrate on KNIME Analytics Platform first and provide an overview of what it can accomplish.

KNIME Analytics Platform

KNIME Analytics Platform is an open source piece of software for all your data needs. It is free to download from the KNIME website (https://www.knime.com/downloads) and free to use. It covers all the main data wrangling and machine learning techniques available at the time of writing, and it is based on visual programming.

Visual programming is a key feature of KNIME Analytics Platform for quick prototyping. It makes the tool very easy to use. In visual programming, a Graphical...

To install KNIME Analytics Platform, follow these steps:

1. Go to .
2. Provide some details about yourself (step 1 in Figure 1.2).
3. Download the version that's suitable for your operating system (step 2 in Figure 1.2).
4. While you're waiting for the appropriate version to download, browse through the different steps to get started (step 3 in Figure 1.2):

Figure 1.2 – Steps for downloading the KNIME Analytics Platform package

Once you've downloaded the package, locate it, start it, and follow the instructions that appear onscreen to install it in any directory that you have write permissions for.

Once it's been installed, locate your instance of KNIME Analytics Platform – from the appropriate folder, desktop link, application, or link in the start menu – and start it.

When the splash screen appears, a window will ask for the location of your workspace (Figure...

In this section, you will learn how to install and set up KNIME Deep Learning - Keras Integration in order to train neural networks in KNIME Analytics Platform.

KNIME Analytics Platform consists of a software core and several provided extensions and integrations. Such extensions and integrations are provided by the KNIME community and extend the original software core through a variety of data science functionalities, including advanced algorithms for AI.

The KNIME extension of interest here is called KNIME Deep Learning – Keras Integration. It offers a codeless GUI-based integration of the Keras library, while using TensorFlow as its backend. This means that a number of functions from Keras libraries have been wrapped into KNIME nodes, within KNIME's classic, easy-to-use visual dialog window. Due to this integration, you can read, write, create, train, and execute deep learning networks without writing code...

In this book, our aim is to provide you with a strong theoretical basis about deep learning architectures and training paradigms, as well as some detailed codeless experience of their implementations for solving practical case studies based on real-world data.

For this journey, we have adopted the codeless tool, KNIME Analytics Platform. KNIME Analytics Platform is based on visual programming and exploits a user-friendly GUI to make data analytics a more affordable task without the barrier of coding. As with many other external extensions, KNIME Analytics Platform has integrated the Keras libraries under this same GUI, thus including deep learning as part of its list of codeless extensions. From within KNIME Analytics Platform, you can build, train, and test a deep learning architecture with just a few drag and drops and a few clicks of the mouse. We provided a little introduction to the tool in this chapter, but we will provide more detailed information...

This first chapter aimed to prepare you for the content provided in this book.

Thus, we started this chapter by reminding you of the importance of deep learning, as well as the surge in popularity it garnered following the first deep learning success stories. Such a surge in popularity is probably what brought you here, with the desire to learn more about practical implementations of deep learning networks for real use cases.

Nowadays, the main barrier that we come across when learning about deep learning is the coding skills that are required. Here, we adopted KNIME software, and in particular the open source KNIME Analytics Platform, so that we can look at the case studies that will be proposed throughout this book. To do this, we described KNIME software and KNIME Analytics Platform in detail.

KNIME Analytics Platform also benefits from an extension known as KNIME Deep Learning – Keras Integration, which helps with integrating Keras deep learning libraries...