Deep Learning

The textbook by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville surveys deep learning, the branch of machine learning in which computers learn from experience by building a layered hierarchy of concepts. It starts with the mathematical groundwork: linear algebra, probability and information theory, numerical computation and basic machine learning. It then describes methods used in industry, including regularization, deep feedforward networks, optimization, convolutional networks and sequence modeling, with applications from speech recognition and computer vision to bioinformatics and games. The final part turns to research topics such as autoencoders, Monte Carlo methods, approximate inference and deep generative models. It suits undergraduate and graduate students as well as software engineers adding deep learning to products.

Elon Musk endorsed it as the one comprehensive text on the subject, written by three experts, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised its clear, direct treatment of the math. It also appears on a published list of seven books recommended by Satya Nadella.