Top 10 Deep Learning Algorithms You Should Know in 2025

It’s happening! Almost every industry is employing deep learning’s vast potential to drive innovation. Though conceptualised in 1986 by Rina Dechter, deep learning recently advanced beyond theory as computing power and datasets scaled massively. To give you an idea, the global Machine Learning market size is expected to grow from USD 26.03 billion in 2023 to USD 225.91 billion by 2030, that’s massive. A prime example could be Amazon, the company reported a 29% sales increase to USD 12.83 billion during its second fiscal quarter, up from $9.9 billion during the same time last year. The majority of this growth rate is contributed by Amazon’s integrated recommendations using ML algorithms. 

From smarter manufacturing machines to personalised healthcare, deep learning can optimise efficiencies and growth opportunities across business functions. Today, we will be sharing the top 10 deep-learning algorithms that can deliver groundbreaking ML innovations in 2024.

What are Deep Learning Algorithms?

Deep learning algorithms are a modern approach to machine learning that uses artificial neural networks, specifically multi-layer neural networks, to learn from large volumes of unstructured data. They differ from traditional machine learning in their ability to automatically learn complex data representations at multiple levels of abstraction without the need for explicit human-driven feature engineering. Deep learning excels at working with image, text, speech and video data. It can detect patterns and relationships within unstructured inputs that other machine-learning techniques may miss. 

How Deep Learning Algorithms Work?

Deep learning algorithms work by passing the input data through multiple layers within an artificial neural network. Each layer consists of interconnected nodes which apply a non-linear transformation to the data it receives and pass this transformed output to nodes in the next layer. The first layer takes in raw data inputs. As data flows through more layers, the network automatically extracts increasingly complex features and patterns within the data. The final output layer converts the learned representations into desired predictions, classifications, etc. The algorithm is trained by adjusting inter-layer connection strengths (weights) to minimise the error between predictions and true labels through an automated iterative process called backpropagation.

10 Deep Learning Algorithms You Should Know

Let’s understand more about deep learning algorithms along with their use cases in real life:

1. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): CNNs are specialised in processing data with a grid-like topology. Characterised by their convolutional layers, they excel in tasks like image and video recognition, image classification, and also in areas like medical image analysis.

2. Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs): A type of recurrent neural network (RNN) that is capable of learning long-term dependencies. LSTMs are particularly useful for sequence prediction problems and have proven to be effective for tasks like language translation, speech recognition, and time-series forecasting.

3. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): Designed to recognise patterns in sequences of data, such as text, genomes, handwriting, or spoken words. Unlike feedforward neural networks, RNNs can use their internal state (memory) to process sequences of inputs, making them powerful for sequential data analysis.

4. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Consists of two neural networks, the generator and the discriminator, which are trained simultaneously through adversarial processes. They're widely used for generating realistic images, enhancing low-resolution photos, and creating art.

5. Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFNs): Uses radial basis functions as their activation functions. The output of the network is a linear combination of radial basis functions of the inputs and neuron parameters. RBFNs are often used for function approximation, time series prediction, and control.

6. Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs): A class of feedforward artificial neural networks that consists of at least three layers of nodes: an input layer, a hidden layer, and an output layer. MLPs can approximate virtually any continuous function and are widely used in deep learning.

7. Self Organising Maps (SOMs): Unsupervised learning networks that use a neighbourhood function to preserve the topological properties of the input space. This makes SOMs useful for visualising low-dimensional views of high-dimensional data, akin to dimensionality reduction techniques.

8. Deep Belief Networks (DBNs): Generative graphical models, or neural networks, composed of multiple layers of stochastic, latent variables. The latent variables typically have binary values and are often learned one layer at a time. DBNs can be used for feature extraction and pattern recognition tasks.

9. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs): A variant of Boltzmann machines, with a restriction that their neurons must form a bipartite graph: a pair of layers where each node in one layer is connected to all nodes in the other layer. They're effective in dimensionality reduction, classification, regression, collaborative filtering, feature learning, and topic modelling.

10. Autoencoders: Neural networks used for unsupervised learning of efficient coding. An autoencoder aims to learn a representation (encoding) for a set of data, typically for dimensionality reduction or feature learning.

5 Most Common Deep Learning Applications

Deep learning powers technologies you are likely to engage with daily—digital assistants, ad targeting, image recognition and more, you name it. But the most common deep learning applications include:

Fraud Detection and Cybersecurity

As cyber threats rapidly become advanced, organisations are leveraging deep learning's unparalleled pattern recognition capabilities to detect financial fraud and cyber attacks in real time. By running vast volumes of financial transactions, network traffic, and other security data through complex neural networks trained on prior threats, deep learning algorithms can detect anomalies and suspicious activities that are completely unnoticeable to us. This level of real-time detection across massive datasets enables us to instantly flag unauthorised transactions, system intrusions, network anomalies and other threats before major damage occurs. You can say that deep learning is working for a more secure digital world by acting as the first line of defence against threats that bypass traditional security solutions.

Also Read: Evaluating GPU Usage in Cybersecurity

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) allows organisations to apply deep learning advancements to analyse and generate human speech and text with greater precision than ever before. Through neural networks trained on enormous volumes of conversational data and text corpora, you have NLP models capable of performing highly accurate sentiment analysis, language translation, speech-to-text transcription, and text summarisation completely autonomously. As more conversational human data is continuously fed through these systems, the NLP capabilities have the potential to expand exponentially. You can now expect AI to truly understand context, dialects, slang, accents and more in language creating natural interactions between humans and machines

Speech Recognition and Voice Assistants

Deep learning now forms the backbone of most speech recognition and voice assistant interfaces that are being widely adopted. Highly advanced neural networks now enable speech transcription capabilities with greater than 90% precision - something that was once unattainable. I would say that with artificial intelligence, things that were once considered unrealistic or impossible are slowly but surely becoming possible. The ability of machines to accurately recognise a wide variety of accents and filter out background noise to understand human speech is a perfect example of deep learning expanding the boundaries of what AI can achieve.

Healthcare and Medical Imaging

By applying deep learning algorithms to medical images, data records and scientific research, you can accomplish more timely, accurate and personalised diagnoses and treatments. Neural networks trained on huge labelled datasets of medical images, health records, and scientific papers can surface radiology anomalies difficult for humans to catch, predict patients' future health outcomes, recommend optimal drugs and doses, match patients for clinical trials, and much more. The future potential to save and extend lives is truly extraordinary- while freeing doctors to focus more on direct patient care.

Gaming and Virtual Reality

Deep learning is also changing the gaming industry - for both players and developers. By enabling more realistic and reactive VR environments plus intelligent non-player characters, deep learning algorithms are taking immersion to new heights. When trained on human behavioural play data, games leveraging deep reinforcement learning can simulate much more human-like, real-time decision-making and situational reactions from in-game characters and opponents. This level of dynamic logic combined with the realistic graphics powered by deep neural networks trained extensively on visuals yields vastly more lifelike video game and VR worlds for you to experience thanks to deep learning capabilities. 

Conclusion

As you have seen, deep learning algorithms represent a step forward for artificial intelligence. By imitating the neural networks of the human brain, these multi-layered algorithms can teach themselves complex concepts from raw data, without the need for explicit programming. As the algorithms ingest more data, their models continue to refine, allowing applications in computer vision, speech recognition, and beyond that were once impossible. 

However, the full potential of deep learning requires scalable and cost-effective computational power. That's where cloud-based GPU solutions come in. By leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs in the cloud, you can train sophisticated deep neural networks without up-front hardware investments.

Cloud platforms like Hyperstack let you access NVIDIA GPUs on demand. This is how many companies can now deploy deep learning so effectively. For instance, an e-commerce site can quickly filter millions of product images with powerful NVIDIA GPUs. An insurance firm may leverage GPU to accurately assess risk scenarios using deep learning algorithms. As a developer, by leveraging these on-demand GPU resources, you can build deep learning applications at a fraction of the cost, all while benefiting from the specialised architecture needed to train advanced AI models. Such scalability and flexibility democratise advanced technologies like AI and Machine learning.  

Access high-performance NVIDIA GPUs like the NVIDIA A100, H100 PCIe and H100 SXM for groundbreaking Innovation without breaking the bank. Sign up now to try our cost-effective cloud GPU solutions for deep learning!

FAQs

How deep learning algorithms are different from traditional machine learning?

Deep learning algorithms use artificial neural networks with multiple hidden layers to extract high-level features from raw input data, while traditional machine learning relies more on feature engineering. Deep learning excels at processing unstructured data like images, text, and speech.

What are the applications of deep learning algorithms?

Key applications of deep learning include image and speech recognition, natural language processing, recommendation systems, time series forecasting, self-driving cars, and medical diagnosis. The layered neural networks can learn complex patterns for tasks considered difficult for machines.

Is CNN different from deep learning?

CNNs or Convolutional Neural Networks are a specialised type of deep learning neural network architecture that is exceptionally well-suited for computer vision tasks. While deep learning refers to neural networks with multiple layers in general, CNNs specifically excel at processing pixel data from digital images and video to perform tasks like classification, detection, and segmentation.

What are RNN and CNN?

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are effective at processing sequential data like text, speech, and time series data. They have an internal memory to retain context across input sequences. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are specialised deep-learning neural networks for computer vision. CNNs identify visual patterns in images using convolutional layers and reduce dimensionality through pooling layers to efficiently analyse pixel data.