Julia implementations of the networks described in Nielsen's Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Pkg.add("MNIST") in the Julia interpreter to get access to the MNIST dataset.

Here are my notes for the first network implemented in network.jl: The Hello World Network, if you will.

network.jl is a really barebones neural network with:

• Initialize weights and biases using a Gaussian with mean=0 and stdv=1
• Sigmoid activation function for the neurons
• Quadratic cost function (no regularization)
• Backprop and SGD to update weights and biases

network2.jl implements some improvements (everything else is the same):

• Initialize weights using a Gaussian with mean=0 and stdv=1/sqrt(n_in) where n_in is number of weights connecting in to the neuron
• Cross-entropy cost function (with L2 regularization)

Need to do:

• Fully matrix based approach (be gone for loops!)