Project - Identify handwritten digits in MNIST

Objectives

1. Use MNIST data set to identify the different numerics (digits) from the given pictures using various best possible models (ML algorithms).
2. Report the values of the performance measures for different models.
3. Report the model that performs best, and fine-tune the same model using one of the model fine-tuning techniques, and report the best possible combination of hyperparameters for the selected model.
4. Use the selected model to make final predictions and report the values of various performance measures for the same.

Hint: You can use dimensionality reduction to simplify the things.

Hint: Use the following code to get the MNIST dataset

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_openml
mnist = fetch_openml('mnist_784', version=1, cache=True)