I need to find Simplest exercises available for learning neural networks

Question

I'm learning neural networks, and I'd like to give myself simple exercises and try to train neural networks to solve them.

I know that classifying hand-written digits is a classic problem, but I'm hoping for something much simpler than that. No image recognition, no thousand of input neurons.

One exercise I thought of, is to get a number and find its modulo when dividing by 7. But it was explained to me that this is actually a difficult task for a neural network beginner for various reasons.

Does anyone have ideas for a very simple exercise/training idea? Or a link to an existing list of exercises?

Answer 1

I suggest you to practice with small datasets such as:

• the breast cancer dataset from U Wisconsin,
• the Titanic dataset, very famous used in many tutorials
• the spam detection dataset

These are good for classification tasks. For regression tasks, I suggest you something like the Boston housing dataset, downloadable directly from sklearn.

They are all very small datasets that can be trained in few minutes (if not seconds). They are really useful to get used to model tuning, minibatch training, and the syntax of course.

In my very first experiment with Neural Networks I trained one on the breast cancer dataset, a simple dense network that trained in few seconds on an average laptop. You can take a look here.

Answer 2

I'm learning myself too and I found kaggle.com and excellent resource for learning and practice, they have lots of data sets available for you to try your own models.

There is also a learn section with lots of topics for beginners

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

I am not sure if you have heard about it but mimicking boolean functions using neural networks is one of the most basic problems. Here is a link if you want to know more - https://towardsdatascience.com/emulating-logical-gates-with-a-neural-network-75c229ec4cc9 or here - https://towardsdatascience.com/perceptrons-logical-functions-and-the-xor-problem-37ca5025790a

Answer 4

Here's one exercise I came up with:

Given a set of 6 English letters, predict whether there is a 6-letter English word that is composed of these letters.

I solved it to 90% accuracy without knowing much about neural networks.

I'll be happy to get more simple exercise problems!