Cranium Course

What is Cranium?

Cranium is a portable, header-only, feedforward artificial neural network library written in vanilla C99.

It supports fully-connected networks of arbitrary depth and structure, and should be reasonably fast as it uses a matrix-based approach to calculations. It is particularly suitable for low-resource machines or environments in which additional dependencies cannot be installed.

Cranium supports CBLAS integration. Simply uncomment line 7 in matrix.h to enable the BLAS sgemm function for fast matrix multiplication.

Features

• Activation functions

  • sigmoid

  • ReLU

  • tanh

  • softmax (classification)

  • linear (regression)

• Loss functions

  • Cross-entropy loss (classification)

  • Mean squared error (regression)

• Optimization algorithms

  • Batch Gradient Descent

  • Stochastic Gradient Descent

  • Mini-Batch Stochastic Gradient Descent

• L2 Regularization

• Learning rate annealing

• Simple momentum

• Fan-in weight initialization

• CBLAS support for fast matrix multiplication

• Serializable networks

Course Content

• Introduction to features
• Usage
• Building and testing