Programming Machine Learning

Chapter 6Getting Real

It’s time to make the leap from simple pizza-related examples to the cool stuff: image recognition. We’re about to do something magical. Within a few pages, we’ll have a program that classifies images.

In this chapter and the next, we’ll apply our binary classifier to MNIST, a database of handwritten digits.^[14] Just a few years ago, before ML systems could tackle more complex datasets, AI researchers used MNIST as a benchmark for their algorithms. In this chapter, we’ll join that esteemed crowd.

 

“Not MNIST Again!”

Besides being a common benchmark in the industry, MNIST is a bit like the “Hello, World!” of ML tutorials. In fact, if you had previous exposure to ML, you might roll your eyes at the sight of yet another ...