Exercise – image classification on Fashion-MNIST with CNN
This will be our first example of using a CNN for a real-world machine learning task. We will classify images using a CNN. The reason for not starting with an NLP task is that applying CNNs to NLP tasks (for example, sentence classification) is not very straightforward. There are several tricks involved in using CNNs for such a task. However, originally, CNNs were designed to cope with image data. Therefore, let’s start there, and then find our way through to see how CNNs apply to NLP tasks in the Using CNNs for sentence classification section.
About the data
In this exercise, we will use a dataset well-known in the computer vision community: the Fashion-MNIST dataset. Fashion-MNIST was inspired by the famous MNIST dataset (http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/). MNIST is a database of labeled images of handwritten digits from 0 to 9 (i.e. 10 digits). However, due to the simplicity of the MNIST image classification...