# Deep Learning with many categories

Do deep learning algorithms run into trouble when tasked with classifying high dimensional input into one of many categories? By many I mean thousands or millions. If it does, how could one deal with this problem? Any references?

• by deep learning do you mean neural networks? – Franck Dernoncourt Dec 30 '16 at 17:25
• @FranckDernoncourt yeah, sorry I'm not up to speed on the jargon with these things – Taylor Dec 30 '16 at 17:35
• In science, when categorizing with millions of possible categories, usually some hierarchcal system is built, like in biological systematics. There will be two cases: Building such a system, or cateforizing into a known system. Which case is yours? – kjetil b halvorsen Dec 30 '16 at 18:47
• @kjetilbhalvorsen thanks that's helpful. I don't really have one, I am just being curious at the moment. I know the output of say a CNN will give you a vector of probabilities over your categories, so I am curious if and why things become hard to discern when looking at examples besides this MNIST dataset. The more bins you divide up $1$ into, the smaller the differences in their volume. just wondering – Taylor Dec 30 '16 at 19:02