Building neural networks from scratch in R

Although we have already used some neural network algorithms, it's time to dig a bit deeper into how they work. This section demonstrates how to code a neural network from scratch. It might surprise you to see that the core code for a neural network can be written in fewer than 80 lines! The code for this chapter does just that using an interactive web application written in R. It should give you more of an intuitive understanding of neural networks. First we will look at the web application, then we will delve more deeply into the code for the neural network.

Neural network web application

First, we will look at an R Shiny web application. I encourage you to run the application and follow the examples as it will really help you to get a better understanding of how neural networks work. In order to run it, you will have to open the Chapter3 project in RStudio.

Note

What is R Shiny?R Shiny is an R package from the RStudio company that allows you to create...