Deep Belief Nets in C++ and Cuda C

Deep belief nets are one of the most exciting recent developments in artificial intelligence. The structure of these elegant models is much closer to that of human brains than traditional neural networks; they have a 'thought process' that is capable of learning abstract concepts built from simpler primitives. A typical deep belief net can learn to recognize complex patterns by optimizing millions of parameters, yet this model can still be resistant to overfitting. This book presents the essential building blocks of the most common forms of deep belief nets.

At each step the text provides intuitive motivation, a summary of the most important equations relevant to the topic, and concludes with highly commented code for threaded computation on modern CPUs as well as massive parallel processing on computers with CUDA-capable video display cards. Source code for all routines presented in the book, and the DEEP program which implements these algorithms, are available for free download from the author's website.

NOTE... The source code available for free download includes all of the code listed in the book, along with some libraries of related routines. Complete code for the DEEP program is not included; this code is enormous, as it includes many Windows-only interface routines, screen display code, and so forth. Users who wish to write their own DBN programs are responsible for implementing their own hardware/OS interface, while using my supplied code for the mathematical calculations.

About the Author

Timothy Masters received a PhD in mathematical statistics with a specialization in numerical computing. Since then he has continuously worked as an independent consultant for government and industry. His early research involved automated feature detection in high-altitude photographs while he developed applications for flood and drought prediction, detection of hidden missile silos, and identification of threatening military vehicles.

Later he worked with medical researchers in the development of computer algorithms for distinguishing between benign and malignant cells in needle biopsies. For the last twenty years he has focused primarily on methods for evaluating automated financial market trading systems.

He has authored five books on practical applications of predictive modeling: Practical Neural Network Recipes in C++ (Academic Press, 1993) Signal and Image Processing with Neural Networks (Wiley, 1994) Advanced Algorithms for Neural Networks (Wiley, 1995) Neural, Novel, and Hybrid Algorithms for Time Series Prediction (Wiley, 1995) Assessing and Improving Prediction and Classification (CreateSpace, 2013).