A Beginners Guide to Neural Nets

To give the NN some context we will consider one of the original problems it was applied to - handwritten digit recognition [4]. This problem is often one of the first encountered by students of Deep Learning as it represents a problem that is hard to solve with traditional machine learning methods. Imagine that we are tasked to write a computer program that can identify handwritten digits. Each image we receive will be 28 x 28 pixels and we will also have access to the correct label for that image. The first thing we do is set up our neural network as in the figure below.