My Neural Network isn't working! What should I do?

So you're developing the next great breakthrough in deep learning but you've hit an unfortunate setback: your neural network isn't working and you have no idea what to do. You go to your boss/supervisor but they don't know either - they are just as new to all of this as you - so what now? Well luckily for you I'm here with a list of all the things you've probably done wrong and compiled from my own experiences implementing neural networks and supervising other students with their projects: When using neural networks it is essential to think exactly how you are going to normalize your data. This is a non-negotiable step - there is very little chance of your network working at all without doing this correctly and with some care. Since this step is so essential and so well known in the deep learning community it is very rarely mentioned in papers and so almost always trips up beginners. In general normalization means this - subtract the mean from your data and divide your data by it's standard deviation.