Classifying handwritten digits
In the previous section, we covered a lot of the theory around neural networks, which can be a little bit overwhelming if you are new to this topic. Before we continue with the discussion of the algorithm for learning the weights of the MLP model, backpropagation, let's take a short break from the theory and see a neural network in action.
Note
The neural network theory can be quite complex, thus I want to recommend two additional resources, which cover some of the concepts that we discuss in this chapter in more detail:
- Chapter 6, Deep Feedforward Networks, Deep Learning, I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, MIT Press, 2016. (Manuscripts freely accessible at http://www.deeplearningbook.org.)
- Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, C. M. Bishop and others, Volume 1. Springer New York, 2006.
In this section, we will implement and train our first multilayer neural network to classify handwritten digits from the popular Mixed National Institute of Standards...