In this exercise, you will implement the backpropagation algorithm for neural networks and apply it to the task of hand-written digit recognition. Before starting on the programming exercise, we strongly recommend watching the video lectures and completing the review questions for the associated topics.
To get started with the exercise, you will need to download the starter code and unzip its contents to the directory where you wish to complete the exercise. If needed, use the cd command in Octave/MATLAB to change to this directory before starting this exercise.
You can also find instructions for installing Octave/MATLAB in the “En- vironment Setup Instructions” of the course website.
Files included in this exercise
ex4.m - Octave/MATLAB script that steps you through the exercise
ex4data1.mat - Training set of hand-written digits
ex4weights.mat - Neural network parameters for exercise 4
submit.m - Submission script that sends your solutions to our servers
displayData.m - Function to help visualize the dataset fmincg.m - Function minimization routine (similar to fminunc) sigmoid.m - Sigmoid function
computeNumericalGradient.m - Numerically compute gradients checkNNGradients.m - Function to help check your gradients debugInitializeWeights.m - Function for initializing weights predict.m - Neural network prediction function
[?] sigmoidGradient.m - Compute the gradient of the sigmoid function
[?] randInitializeWeights.m - Randomly initialize weights
[?] nnCostFunction.m - Neural network cost function
? indicates files you will need to complete
Throughout the exercise, you will be using the script ex4.m. These scripts set up the dataset for the problems and make calls to functions that you will write. You do not need to modify the script. You are only required to modify functions in other files, by following the instructions in this assignment.
Submission and Grading
After completing various parts of the assignment, be sure to use the submit function system to submit your solutions to our servers. The following is a breakdown of how each part of this exercise is scored.
Part
Submitted File
Points
Feedforward and Cost Function
Regularized Cost Function
nnCostFunction.m
nnCostFunction.m
30 points
15 points
Sigmoid Gradient
sigmoidGradient.m
5 points
Neural Net Gradient Function
(Backpropagation) Regularized Gradient
nnCostFunction.m
nnCostFunction.m
40 points
10 points
Total Points
100 points
You are allowed to submit your solutions multiple times, and we will take only the highest score into consideration.
