Building a multilayer perceptron neural network

In this section, we introduce the MNIST problem and learn how to build a MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) network using Caffe2 to solve it. We also learn how to load pretrained parameters into the network and use it for inference.

MNIST problem

The MNIST problem is a classic image classification problem that used to be popular in machine learning. State-of-the-art methods can now achieve greater than 99% accuracy in relation to this problem, so it is no longer relevant. However, it acts as a stepping stone for us to learn how to build a Caffe2 network that solves a real machine learning problem.

The MNIST problem lies in identifying the handwritten digit that is present in a grayscale...