Should I normalize my features before throwing them into RNN?

Question

I am playing some demos about recurrent neural network.

I noticed that the scale of my data in each column differs a lot. So I am considering to do some preprocess work

Answer 1

Definetly yes. Most of neural networks work best with data beetwen 0-1 or -1 to 1(depends on output function). Also when some inputs are higher then others network will "think" they are more important. This can make learning very long. Network must first lower weights in this inputs.