Advanced Deep Learning with Keras

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs)

We're now going to look at the last of our three artificial neural networks, Recurrent neural networks, or RNNs.

RNNs are a family of networks that are suitable for learning representations of sequential data like text in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or stream of sensor data in instrumentation. While each MNIST data sample is not sequential in nature, it is not hard to imagine that every image can be interpreted as a sequence of rows or columns of pixels. Thus, a model based on RNNs can process each MNIST image as a sequence of 28-element input vectors with timesteps equal to 28. The following listing shows the code for the RNN model in Figure 1.5.1:

Figure 1.5.1: RNN model for MNIST digit classification

In the ...