MNIST Example¶

MNIST is a computer vision dataset consisting of 70,000 images of handwritten digits. Each image has 28x28 pixels for a total of 784 features, and is associated with a digit between 0-9.

In this tutorial, we will construct a multi-layer perceptron (also called softmax regression) to recognize each image. Note that this tutorial assumes some basic familiarity with python and machine learning.

This tutorial is similar to the model specified in examples/mnist_mlp.py.

Preamble¶

The first step is to set up the argument parser, which enables customizing options with flags (see the previous chapter).

#!/usr/bin/env python
from neon.util.argparser import NeonArgparser

parser = NeonArgparser(__doc__)
args = parser.parse_args()


By default, parse_args() will create a computational backend on a GPU, if present, or a CPU.

MNIST dataset¶

The MNIST dataset can be found on Yann LeCunn’s website. We have included an easy function that downloads the MNIST dataset into your nervana/data/ directory and loads it into memory.

from neon.data import MNIST

mnist = MNIST()

(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test), nclass = mnist.load_data()


This function automatically splits the images X and labels y into training (60,000 examples) and testing (10,000 examples) data. The training images X_train is a numpy array with shape (num_examples, num_features) = (60000, 784).

During training, neon iterates over the training examples to compute the gradients. We use the following commands to set up the ArrayIterator object that we send to the optimizer.

from neon.data import ArrayIterator

# setup training set iterator
train_set = ArrayIterator(X_train, y_train, nclass=nclass)
# setup test set iterator
test_set = ArrayIterator(X_test, y_test, nclass=nclass)


For small datasets like MNIST, this step may seem trivial. However, for large datasets that cannot fit into memory (e.g. ImageNet or Sports-1M), the data has to be efficiently loaded and fed to the optimizer in batches. This requires more advanced iterators described in Loading Data.

Since it is a common function, the data iterator generation for stock datasets can be done directly through helper methods contained in the DataSet class. For example, the MNIST training and validation set iterators can be obtained with the following code:

from neon.data import MNIST
mnist = MNIST()
train_set = mnist.train_iter
test_set = mnist.valid_iter


Model specification¶

Training a deep learning model in neon requires specifying the dataset, a list of layers, a cost function, and the learning rule. Here we guide you through each item in turn.

Initializing weights¶

Neon supports many ways of initializing weight matrices. In this tutorial, we initialize the weights using a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and 0.01 standard deviation.

from neon.initializers import Gaussian

init_norm = Gaussian(loc=0.0, scale=0.01)


Model architecture¶

The model is specified as a list of layers. For classifying MNIST images, we use a multi-layer perceptron with fully connected layers.

• Affine (i.e. fully-connected) layer with 100 hidden units and a rectified linear activation function, defined as Rectlin().

• An output layer with 10 units to match the number of labels in the MNIST dataset. We use the Softmax() activation function to ensure the outputs sum to one and are within the range $$[0, 1]$$.

from neon.layers import Affine
from neon.transforms import Rectlin, Softmax

layers = []
layers.append(Affine(nout=100, init=init_norm, activation=Rectlin()))
layers.append(Affine(nout=10, init=init_norm,
activation=Softmax()))


We initialize the weights in each layer with the init_norm defined previously. Neon supports many other layer types (convolutional, pooling, recurrent, etc.) that will be described in subsequent examples. We then construct the model via

# initialize model object
from neon.models import Model

mlp = Model(layers=layers)


Costs¶

The cost function is wrapped within a GeneralizedCost layer, which handles the comparison of the outputs with the provided labels in the dataset. One common cost function which we use here is the cross entropy loss.

from neon.layers import GeneralizedCost
from neon.transforms import CrossEntropyMulti

cost = GeneralizedCost(costfunc=CrossEntropyMulti())


Learning rules¶

For learning, we use stochastic gradient descent with a learning rate of 0.1 and momentum coefficient of 0.9.

from neon.optimizers import GradientDescentMomentum



Additional optimizers and optional arguments are discussed in Optimizers.

Callbacks¶

Neon provides an API for calling operations during the model fit (see Callbacks). Here we set up the default callback, which is displaying a progress bar for each epoch.

from neon.callbacks.callbacks import Callbacks

callbacks = Callbacks(mlp, eval_set=test_set, **args.callback_args)


Putting it all together¶

We are ready to put all the ingredients together and run our model!

mlp.fit(train_set, optimizer=optimizer, num_epochs=args.epochs, cost=cost,
callbacks=callbacks)


At the beginning of the fitting procedure, neon propagates train_set through the model to set the input and output shapes of each layer. Each layer has a configure() method that determines the appropriate layer shapes, and an allocate() method to set up the needed buffers for holding the forward propagation information.

During the training, neon sends batches of the training data through the model, calling each layers’ fprop() and bprop() methods to compute the gradients and update the weights.

Using the trained model¶

Now that the model is successfully trained, we can use the trained model to classify a novel image, measure performance, and visualize the weights and training results.

Inference¶

Given a set of images such as those contained in the iterable test_set, we can fetch the output of the final model layer via

results = mlp.get_outputs(test_set)


The variable results is a numpy array with shape (num_test_examples, num_outputs) = (10000,10) with the model probabilities for each label.

Performance¶

Neon supports convenience functions for evaluating performance using custom metrics. Here we measure the misclassification rate on the held out test set.

from neon.transforms import Misclassification

# evaluate the model on test_set using the misclassification metric
error = mlp.eval(test_set, metric=Misclassification())*100
print('Misclassification error = %.1f%%' % error)


Next steps¶

This simple example guides you through the basic operations needed to create and fit a neural network. However, neon contains a rich feature set of customizable layers, metrics, and options. To learn more, we recommend reading through the CIFAR10 tutorial, which introduces convolutional neural networks.