This tutorial is targeted to individuals who are new to CNTK and to machine learning. In this tutorial, you will train a simple yet powerful machine learning model that is widely used in industry for a variety of applications. The model trained below scales to massive data sets in the most expeditious manner by harnessing computational scalability leveraging the computational resources you may have (one or more CPU cores, one or more GPUs, a cluster of CPUs or a cluster of GPUs), transparently via the CNTK library.
The following notebook uses Python APIs. If you are looking for this example in BrainScript, please look here.
IntroductionProblem: A cancer hospital has provided data and wants us to determine if a patient has a fatal malignant cancer vs. a benign growth. This is known as a classification problem. To help classify each patient, we are given their age and the size of the tumor. Intuitively, one can imagine that younger patients and/or patients with small tumors are less likely to have a malignant cancer. The data set simulates this application: each observation is a patient represented as a dot (in the plot below), where red indicates malignant and blue indicates benign. Note: This is a toy example for learning; in real life many features from different tests/examination sources and the expertise of doctors would play into the diagnosis/treatment decision for a patient.