Programming Machine Learning

Hands On: The 10 Epochs Challenge

Now that you have a few tricks under your belt, you can start experimenting with deep neural networks on your own. Speaking of which, I have a challenge for you.

To set up this challenge, I wrote a neural network and trained it on the MNIST dataset. You already saw plenty of MNIST classifiers, but this time, it’s a deep neural network written in Keras. Go and take a look at it. It’s in network_mnist.py, in this chapter’s source code.

This network doesn’t use any of the techniques from this chapter, but it still does okay. I trained it for 10 epochs and got this result:

loss: 0.2026 - acc: 0.9388 - val_loss: 0.2487 - val_acc: 0.9228

Now it’s your turn. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to improve ...