Introduction to Keras

Here we will provide a brief introduction to Keras, which is a sublibrary of TensorFlow that provides more high-level functions for implementing deep learning algorithms. Keras uses basic TensorFlow operations, underneath; however, it exposes a higher level, beginner-friendly API for users. To see how to use Keras, we will look at a quick example. We will outline how one might create a CNN using Keras. Full exercise can be found at keras_cnn.ipynb located in the appendix folder.

We will first determine what type of a model we will be defining. Keras has two different APIs: sequential and functional. The sequential API is simpler and allows designing a model, layer by layer. However, the sequential API has limited flexibility in designing the organization and connections between layers of the network. On the other hand, the functional API has much more flexibility and allows the user to design the specific details of the neural network. For demonstration purposes, we...