LSTM or other RNN package for R

Question

I saw some impressive result from LSTM models producing Shakespeare like texts. I was wondering if an LSTM package exists for R. I googled for it but only found packages for Python and Julia. (maybe there are some performance issue which explains why these programs are more preferred over R) Do You know about an LSTM (or at least an RNN) package for R? If exists are there any tutorials for using them?

Example link of such results: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ (not sure if this is one you have seen) — Neil Slater, Sep 10 '15 at 09:08
@NeilSlater Yes, that's one nice implementation I saw but unfortunately not for R. — Viktor, Sep 10 '15 at 09:13
I updated my answer to mention the now available LSTM and GRU algorithms in rnn. — Bastiaan Quast, Sep 27 '16 at 10:36

Bastiaan Quast · Answer 1 · 2016-10-18T09:25:19.447

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Have a look at the rnn package (full disclosure, I am the author). It implements a multilayer RNN, GRU, and LSTM directly in R, i.e. not an underlying C++ library, so you should also be able to read the code and understand what is going on.

install.packages('rnn')

The CRAN version is quite up to date, but the GitHub version is bleeding edge and can be installed using:

if (!require('devtools')) install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('bquast/rnn')

edited Oct 18 '16 at 09:25

answered Aug 12 '16 at 16:30

Bastiaan Quast

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Thanks for the nice package! I just started experimenting with it. I wonder if you have made any speed comparison with other implementations. – Viktor Feb 03 '17 at 10:54
if its in R is it really slow? – ran8 Apr 08 '18 at 22:58
not really, it's fast enough for reasonable work, there are ofc memory limitations – Bastiaan Quast Apr 11 '18 at 10:17

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 19 '17 at 11:53

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Keras is also now available for R. Here's an example of an LSTM with the R API.

answered Oct 19 '17 at 11:53

captainpete

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score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 02 '15 at 00:07

You might have to extend another package to implement LSTM and RNN in R. Here are some packages to get you started:

deepnet Implements a variety of deep learning architectures
darch A deep architecture
H2O An open-source company with deep learning packages

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 10 '15 at 08:07

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I found this page, but the R package seems not to be open source : link.

answered Sep 10 '15 at 08:07

dom

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It seems promising. According to the author he will publish it on CRAN when finished. – Viktor Sep 10 '15 at 09:15

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 14 '16 at 21:26

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You might want to take a look at mxnet. It is a distributed library for deep learning. It supports C++, python, scala and R. There are many examples with R. Here you have an example of LSTM in R with this library.

answered Aug 14 '16 at 21:26

hoaphumanoid

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LSTM or other RNN package for R

5 Answers5