Overarching aims of the exercises weeks 43 and 44
The aim of the exercises this week and next week is to get started with writing a neural network code
of relevance for project 2.
During week 41 we discussed three different types of gates, the
so-called XOR, the OR and the AND gates. In order to develop a code
for neural networks, it can be useful to set up a simpler system with
only two inputs and one output. This can make it easier to debug and
study the feed forward pass and the back propagation part. In the
exercise this and next week, we propose to study this system with just
one hidden layer and two hidden nodes. There is only one output node
and we can choose to use either a simple regression case (fitting a
line) or just a binary classification case with the cross-entropy as
cost function.
Their inputs and outputs can be
summarized using the following tables, first for the OR gate with
inputs x_1 and x_2 and outputs y:
| $x_1$ | $x_2$ | $y$ |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |