What Is Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)? See Example

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) designed to overcome the vanishing gradient problem in standard RNNs.

LSTMs are excellent at capturing long-term dependencies in sequential data, making them ideal for text, speech, and time series analysis.


How LSTM Works

  1. Cell State: Maintains long-term memory throughout the sequence.
  2. Gates: Control information flow:
    • Forget Gate: Decides what to discard from memory
    • Input Gate: Decides what new information to add
    • Output Gate: Decides what part of memory to output
  3. Sequence Processing: Combines hidden states and cell states to produce outputs while retaining important information.

Advantages of LSTM

  • Captures long-term dependencies in sequences
  • Solves vanishing gradient issues in RNNs
  • Works well with variable-length sequences
  • Flexible for NLP, speech, and time series tasks

Disadvantages

  • Computationally intensive
  • Requires more data and training time than standard RNNs
  • Complex architecture can be harder to implement

Real-World Examples

  • Language translation (Google Translate)
  • Speech recognition (voice assistants)
  • Text generation (chatbots, story generation)
  • Stock price prediction
  • Video and sequence analysis

Conclusion

LSTM networks enhance RNNs by remembering long-term information, making them indispensable for complex sequential tasks in AI.


Citations

https://savanka.com/category/learn/ai-and-ml/
https://www.w3schools.com/ai/

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