My First Hands-On ML Experiment: Training a Digit Classifier on Google

What happens when you stop reading about machine learning and actually train a model?

On 24 October, I attended the Accelerated Intelligence Lab organized by GDG. During the workshop, we worked with Google Colab, TensorFlow, and Keras to train a neural network that recognizes handwritten digits.

The instructor provided the implementation and guided us through running it. We followed the notebook, trained the model, and observed its accuracy and validation results.

I wanted to understand more than just whether the model worked. I wanted to understand what was happening between giving it an image and getting a prediction.

Here's what I learned from the experiment.

The experiment: teaching a model to recognize digits

We used the MNIST dataset, which contains images of handwritten digits from 0 to 9.…