Introduction

Much of this book will focus on building deep learning algorithms with libraries in Python, such as TensorFlow and Keras. While these libraries are helpful to build deep neural networks without getting deep into the calculus and linear algebra of deep learning, this chapter will do a deep dive into building a simple neural network in PySpark to make a gender prediction based on height and weight. One of the best ways to understand the foundation of neural networks is to build a model from scratch, without any of the popular deep learning libraries. Once the foundation for a neural network framework is established, understanding and utilizing some of the more popular deep neural network libraries will become much simpler.