A Simple Shallow Convolutional Neural Network for Accurate Handwritten Digit Classification

Abstract

At present the deep neural network is the hottest topic in the domain of machine learning and can accomplish a deep hierarchical representation of the input data. Due to deep architecture the large convolutional neural networks can reach very small test error rates below 0.4% using the MNIST database. In this work we have shown, that high accuracy can be achieved using reduced shallow convolutional neural network without adding distortions for digits. The main contribution of this paper is to point out how using simplified convolutional neural network is to obtain test error rate 0.71% on the MNIST handwritten digit benchmark. It permits to reduce computational resources in order to model convolutional neural network.