Convolutional Neural Network in C

• Plain C99.
• Simple.
• Straightforward.
• For educational purposes.

bnn.c

• Primitive SGD.
• Only one type of layer (sigmoid).
• No minibatch, no dropout, etc.

Exercises

• $ cc -o bnn bnn.c -lm
• Increase the number of epochs and see how the error rate drops.
• Try different learning rates.
• Try different functions to learn.

cnn.c

• Simple SGD + Minibatch.
• Three types of layers (input, convolutional, fully-connected).
• ReLU for conv layers.
• Tanh for non-last fc layers.
• Softmax for the output (last) layer.

Exercises

• Obtain the MNIST database from http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
• Compile and run mnist.c.
• Set the batch size to 1 (no minibatch) and see the results.
• Try changing the last layer from softmax to tanh.
• Change the network configurations and see how the accuracy changes.

rnn.c

• Stateful + Simple SGD + Minibatch.
• Only one type of layer (Truncated BPTT).
• No gate.

What I (re)discovered through this (re)implementation.

• Use a proper learning rate.
• Use minibatch training.
• Use Softmax for the output layer.
• Use Tanh/ReLU.
• Choose the initial weight distribution wisely.
• Feed the same data multiple times in a random order.
• Memorize past outputs/errors for RNN.

What I further learned...

In addition to the usual ML tips (more data is better, balanced data is better, data prep. matters, etc.), I learned the following when you design your own NN model:

• Encoding/decoding matters.
• Loss function is super important. It can make or break the whole project.
• Learning rate / scheduler is also important. (But today it's getting easier with Adam, etc.)
• Do not mix different activation functions at the output layer.