Python: Deeper Insights into Machine Learning

Convergence in neural networks

You might be wondering why we did not use regular gradient descent but mini-batch learning to train our neural network for the handwritten digit classification. You may recall our discussion on stochastic gradient descent that we used to implement online learning. In online learning, we compute the gradient based on a single training example at a time to perform the weight update. Although this is a stochastic approach, it often leads to very accurate solutions with a much faster convergence than regular gradient descent. Mini-batch learning is a special form of stochastic gradient descent where we compute the gradient ...