Tensorflow sprays a lot of calculus. The idea is that all your known quantities ("features") become terms in an n-dimensional polynomial. The act of "training the model" is finding minima by traversing the negative gradient (the terms of the partial derivatives of any point when projected as a vector at that point).
I'm glad I had calc 3, even if that was only 3-dimensional.
Technically, it's not a polynomial as you can have nonlinear activation functions, such as the ReLU function. There's no polynomial that's equal to a network with ReLU activations (although, of course, a sufficiently large polynomial could come arbitrarily close).
I would state that a neural network is a large, complicated, differentiable function, and the beauty of deep learning is that it turns out that by doing optimization that's derived from basic calculus, you can optimize this complicated function to do surprisingly useful things.
https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/...
Tensorflow sprays a lot of calculus. The idea is that all your known quantities ("features") become terms in an n-dimensional polynomial. The act of "training the model" is finding minima by traversing the negative gradient (the terms of the partial derivatives of any point when projected as a vector at that point).
I'm glad I had calc 3, even if that was only 3-dimensional.