Deep learning for cats versus dogs

While MNIST is a very good dataset for educational purpose, it is quite small. Let's take a look at a different image recognition problem: given a picture, we want to predict if there is a cat on the image or a dog.

For this, we will use the dataset with dogs and cats pictures from a competition run on kaggle, and the dataset can be downloaded from https://www.kaggle.com/c/dogs-vs-cats.

Let's start by first reading the data.

Reading the data

For the dogs versus cats competition, there are two datasets; training, with 25,000 images of dogs and cats, 50% each, and testing. For the purposes of this chapter, we only need to download the training dataset. Once you have downloaded it, unpack it somewhere.

The filenames...