Programming Machine Learning

Chapter 15Let’s Do Development

We spent a few chapters building a neural network, and a few more investigating its finer points. In this chapter, we’ll come down to the wire and shoot for 99% accuracy on MNIST. To get there, we’ll follow an iterative process that is the ML equivalent of software development. In fact, you can call it just that: development.

Like software development, ML development is too broad an activity to fit in this chapter—or this book. It involves people with different skills, from mathematicians to engineers. Even the engineering part of the job is vaster than just “build a neural network and tune it”: real-life ML systems are often complicated pipelines composed of multiple algorithms and services. To make things harder, ...