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I wa currently reading up on standard neural network and become a bit confused in the terms used relating training deep neural network versus a normal neural network. Are they trained similarly or differently if so? what difference?

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    $\begingroup$ Depends what you mean by similarly. Deep networks are still trained using backpropagation, but adding more and more layers requires sophisticated ways to combat the vanishing/exploding gradient - careful weights initialization, batch normalization, identity connections, skip identity connections, complex optimizers etc. $\endgroup$ Commented May 4, 2017 at 21:28

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In general, a deep neural network is a neural network with many layers. In practice, there are some qualitative differences, which I'll go into in a sec, but they're still trained using back propagation, in general. As far as qualitative differences, deep networks tend to use layers which facilitate training:

  • convolutional layers have fewer parameters to learn, so can be stacked up relatively deep
  • skip-connections and residual networks facilitate the flow of gradients backwards through the network, so enable back-propagation through relatively large numbers of layers, up to 50-100, instead of maybe less than 10ish
  • dropout facilitates finding reasonably good minimum, not getting stuck in local minimum too much
  • batch normalization facilitates using high learning rates without the gradients becoming too extreme
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