Python Machine Learning - Second Edition

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 ...