Preparing our data for image classification

Given that we are covering multiple scenarios in this chapter, in order for us to see the advantage of one scenario over the other, we will work on a single dataset throughout this chapter – the Fashion MNIST dataset. Let's prepare this dataset:

The following code is available as Preparing_our_data.ipynb in the Chapter03 folder of this book's GitHub repository - https://tinyurl.com/mcvp-packt

1. Start by downloading the dataset and importing the relevant packages. The torchvision package contains various datasets – one of which is the FashionMNIST dataset, which we will be working on in this chapter:

from torchvision import datasets
import torch
data_folder = '~/data/FMNIST' # This can be any directory 
# you want to download FMNIST to
fmnist = datasets.FashionMNIST(data_folder, download=True, \
                               train=True)

In the preceding code, we are specifying the folder (data_folder) where we...