Building, compiling, and running expressions with Theano

In this section, we will explore the powerful Theano tool, which has been designed to train machine learning models most effectively using Python. The Theano development started back in 2008 in the LISA lab (short for Laboratoire d'Informatique des Systèmes Adaptatifs (http://lisa.iro.umontreal.ca)) lead by Yoshua Bengio.

Before we discuss what Theano really is and what it can do for us to speed up our machine learning tasks, let's discuss some of the challenges when we are running expensive calculations on our hardware. Luckily, the performance of computer processors keeps on improving constantly over the years, which allows us to train more powerful and complex learning systems to improve the predictive performance of our machine learning models. Even the cheapest desktop computer hardware that is available nowadays comes with processing units that have multiple cores. In the previous chapters, we saw that many functions...