Re:Neural Networks in JavaScript with Deeplearn.js
by Houshalter on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @10:48PM
(#15858308)
Presumably this will usually be run from a JS engine like Node independent of a browser. Which will have all the libraries needed for loading data and such. In theory it will be an order of magnitude faster than numpy because it uses the GPU (I don't know what the actual performance is though.) Certainly the JS will be much faster than python or R.
Re:Neural Networks in JavaScript with Deeplearn.js
by mr_toad on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @11:22PM
(#15858471)
Deeplearn.js is designed for webGL on a browser. I'm not sure if it'll work in Node. And on a server you'd probably want to target OpenCL.
Node adds file support, but libraries for stuff like dataframes are still in their early days. That might not be a problem for example problems, but real world data needs cleaning up before you can start doing ML.
Re:Neural Networks in JavaScript with Deeplearn.js
by nsthorat on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @11:30PM
(#15858518)
It doesn't work in node yet, a relevant issue: https://github.com/PAIR-code/deeplearnjs/issues/234
JavaScript in the browser lacks good data manipulation libraries (nothing that comes close to using Pandas, or R). Even loading/saving files with the browser is a PITA (by design really, for security reasons).
I can see a day when JavaScript (or web assembly) has APIs like Numpy and Pandas, but for now It's simply easier to install one of those than try and do everything in JavaScript.