Exercise – image classification on MNIST with CNN
This will be our first example of using a CNN for a real-world machine learning task. We will classify images using a CNN. The reason for not starting with an NLP task is that applying CNNs to NLP tasks (for example, sentence classification) is not very straightforward. There are several tricks involved in using CNNs for such a task. However, originally, CNNs were designed to cope with image data. Therefore, let's start there and then find our way through to see how CNNs apply to NLP tasks.
About the data
In this exercise, we will use a dataset well-known in the computer vision community: the MNIST dataset. The MNIST dataset is a database of labeled images of handwritten digits from 0 to 9. The dataset contains three different subdatasets: the training, validation, and test sets. We will train on the training set and evaluate the performance of our model on the unseen test dataset. We will use the validation dataset to improve...
