Flattened data

We will use flattened data in this example, or a representation of MNIST images in one dimension rather than two can also be used. Thus, each 28 x 28 pixels number image will be represented as a 784 pixel 1 dimensional array.

By flattening the data, information about the 2D structure of the image is thrown; however, our data is simplified. With the help of this, all our training data can be contained in one array of shape (60,000, 784), wherein the first dimension represents the number of training images and the second depicts the number of pixels in each image. This kind of data is easy to analyze using a simple neural network, as follows:

# Retrieving the training and test data
(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()


print('X_train shape:', X_train.shape)
print('X_test shape: ', X_test.shape)
print('y_train shape:',y_train.shape)
print('y_test shape: ', y_test.shape)