2 From Model to Production
The six lines of code we saw in Chapter 1 are just one small part of the process of using deep learning in practice. In this chapter, we’re going to use a computer vision example to look at the end-to-end process of creating a deep learning application. More specifically, we’re going to build a bear classifier! In the process, we’ll discuss the capabilities and constraints of deep learning, explore how to create datasets, look at possible gotchas when using deep learning in practice, and more. Many of the key points will apply equally well to other deep learning problems, such as those in Chapter 1. If you work through a problem similar in key respects to our example problems, we expect you to get excellent results with little code, quickly.
Let’s start with how you should frame your problem.
2.1 The Practice of Deep Learning
We’ve seen that deep learning can solve a lot of challenging problems quickly and with little code. As a beginner, there’s a sweet spot of problems that are similar enough to our example problems that you can very quickly get extremely useful results. However, deep learning isn’t magic! The same 6 lines of code won’t work for every problem anyone can think of today. Underestimating the constraints and overestimating the capabilities of deep learning may lead to frustratingly poor results, at least until you gain some experience and can solve the problems that arise. Conversely, overestimating the constraints and underestimating the capabilities of deep learning may mean you do not attempt a solvable problem because you talk yourself out of it.
We often talk to people who underestimate both the constraints and the capabilities of deep learning. Both of these can be problems: underestimating the capabilities means that you might not even try things that could be very beneficial, and underestimating the constraints might mean that you fail to consider and react to important issues.
The best thing to do is to keep an open mind. If you remain open to the possibility that deep learning might solve part of your problem with less data or complexity than you expect, then it is possible to design a process where you can find the specific capabilities and constraints related to your particular problem as you work through the process. This doesn’t mean making any risky bets — we will show you how you can gradually roll out models so that they don’t create significant risks, and can even backtest them prior to putting them in production.
This is just a preview of this chapter. The rest of this chapter is not available here, but you read the source notebook which has the same content (but with less nice formatting).