Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Feedforward Neural Network

In the last couple of posts, we’ve learned about various aspects of Machine Learning. Now, we will focus on other aspects of Machine Learning: Deep Learning. After introducing the key concepts of Deep Learning in the previous post, we will have a look at two concepts: the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Feedforward Neural Network

The Feedforward Neural Network

Feedforward neural networks are the most general-purpose neural network. The entry point is the input layer and it consists of several hidden layers and an output layer. Each layer has a connection to the previous layer. This is one-way only, so that nodes can’t for a cycle. The information in a feedforward network only moves into one direction – from the input layer, through the hidden layers to the output layer. It is the easiest version of a Neural Network. The below image illustrates the Feedforward Neural Network.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

The Convolutional Neural Network is very effective in Image recognition and similar tasks. For that reason it is also good for Video processing. The difference to the Feedforward neural network is that the CNN contains 3 dimensions: width, height and depth. Not all neurons in one layer are fully connected to neurons in the next layer. There are three different type of layers in a Convolutional Neural Network, which are also different to feedforward neural networks:

Convolution Layer

Convolution puts the input image through several convolutional filters. Each filter activates certain features, such as: edges, colors or objects. Next, the feature map is created out of them. The deeper the network goes the more sophisticated those filters become. The convolutional layer automatically learns which features are most important to extract for a specific task.

Rectified linear units (ReLU)

The goal of this layer is to improve the training speed and impact. Negative values in the layers are removed.

Pooling/Subsampling

Pooling simplifies the output by performing nonlinear downsampling. The number of parameters that the network needs to learn about gets reduced. In convolutional neural networks, the operation is useful since the outgoing connections usually receive similar information.

This tutorial is part of the Machine Learning Tutorial. You can learn more about Machine Learning by going through this tutorial. On Cloudvane, there are many more tutorials about (Big) Data, Data Science and alike, read about them in the Big Data Tutorials here. If you look for great datasets to play with, I would recommend you Kaggle.