Introduction to Autoencoders and Feature Learning
Chapter 1: Understanding Autoencoders
Introduction to Unsupervised Learning
A Brief Overview of Neural Networks
The Core Idea: Learning Data Reconstruction
Encoder, Bottleneck, and Decoder: The Main Parts
The Purpose of Learning Data Representations
An Autoencoder Analogy
Initial Problems Addressed by Autoencoders
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Anatomy of an Autoencoder: Encoder and Decoder
The Encoder: Compressing Data
Structure of the Input Layer
Encoder Hidden Layers and Data Compression
The Bottleneck: The Compact Representation
Common Activation Functions in Encoders
The Decoder: Reconstructing Data
Decoder Hidden Layers and Data Decompression
Structure of the Output Layer
Common Activation Functions in Decoders
Matching Input to Output
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: How Autoencoders Learn
Training Objective: Reducing Reconstruction Error
Loss Functions for Autoencoders (MSE, BCE)
The Learning Process: Optimization Basics
Data Flow: Forward Propagation Explained
Learning from Errors: Backpropagation (High-Level)
Training Cycles: Epochs and Batches
A Glimpse into Overfitting and Underfitting
Preparing to Build an Autoencoder
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Autoencoders and Learning Features
Defining Features within Datasets
Comparing Manual and Learned Feature Approaches
How Autoencoders Identify Underlying Features
The Bottleneck Layer as a Feature Extractor
Reducing Dimensions with Autoencoders
Simple Visualization of Learned Representations
Importance of Effective Data Representations
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Building a Basic Autoencoder
Python Environment Setup for Deep Learning
Getting Started with PyTorch and Keras
Loading and Understanding a Basic Dataset
Data Preprocessing for Autoencoders
Constructing a Simple Autoencoder Model
Configuring the Model for Training
Executing the Training Process
Assessing Reconstruction Quality
Visualizing Reconstructed Outputs: Hands-on Practical
Examining Encoded Data: Practice
Quiz for Chapter 5
The Purpose of Learning Data Representations
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- Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - A comprehensive chapter detailing the theory and applications of autoencoders, including their role in learning representations and dimensionality reduction.
- Stacked Denoising Autoencoders: Learning Useful Representations in a Deep Network with a Local Denoising Criterion, Pascal Vincent, Hugo Larochelle, Isabelle Lajoie, and Yoshua Bengio, 2010 Journal of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 11 (Microtome Publishing) DOI: 10.1162/jmlr.2010.11.3371 - A seminal paper introducing denoising autoencoders and demonstrating how they can learn robust, high-level features for improved performance in deep networks.
- A Survey of Autoencoders for Representation Learning, Charmi Mehta, Manisha Prajapati, and Hitesh B. Shah, 2020 Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Vol. 1716 DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/1716/1/012056 - A recent survey paper providing an overview of various autoencoder architectures and their applications in representation learning, including their benefits for feature extraction and dimensionality reduction.