Courses to be taken before taking Course 4 of the specialization

Course Q&A Deep Learning Specialization Convolutional Neural Networks
1

Is taking course 1, 2 and 3 mandatory to be able to understand course 4 ? Since I am interested in CNN, I was thinking of taking course 1 and then moving to course 4 directly. Will the background in course 1 be enough to take course 4 ?

Thanks in advance !

2

In terms of the Neural Network knowledge itself, you could probably go from Course 1 to Course 4 directly. But in addition to the material about tuning neural networks in Course 2, that is also the place where they introduce TensorFlow in Course 2 Week 3. If you already have used TensorFlow version 2 (with Eager Execution) in some other context, then you should be fine skipping Course 2 and Course 3. But if you have never seen TF before, that might be an issue. One thing you could do would be to just watch the lectures on TF in C2 W3 in “audit” mode and skip the exercise and see if that’s enough for you. But the whole point is to have actual experience using TF a bit before you get to C4.

3

Thanks ! So will taking course 1, 2 and then 4 work ? (just skipping 3)

4

Yes, Course 3 is about structuring and managing ML projects and managing datasets. Deciding what to do when your ML system isn’t performing as well as you need it to. There are no programming assignments in C3. It’s valuable material, but you can come back and take that later. There’s nothing in C3 that is a prerequisite to understanding ConvNets (CNNs).

5

Thank you very much !