Recall the MNIST dataset we briefly touched upon in Chapter 04, Advanced Matplotlib. It contains 70,000 images of handwritten digits, often used in data mining tutorials as Machine Learning 101. We will continue using a similar image dataset of handwritten digits for our project in this chapter.
We are almost certain that you had already heard about the popular keywords—deep learning or machine learning in general—before starting with this course. That's why we are choosing it as our showcase. As detailed concepts in machine learning, such as hyperparameter tuning to optimize performance, are beyond the scope of this book, we will not go into them. But we will cover the model training part in a cookbook style. We will focus on how visualization helps our workflow. For those of you interested in the details of machine learning, we recommend exploring further resources that are largely available online.