Designing a VAE in Keras

For this exercise, we will go back to a well-known dataset that is easily available to all: the MNIST dataset. The visual features of handwritten digits make this dataset uniquely suited to experiment with VAEs, allowing us to better understand how these models work. We start by importing the necessary libraries:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from keras.layers import Input, Dense, Lambda, Layer
from keras.models import Model
from keras import backend as K
from keras import metrics
from keras.datasets import mnist

Loading and pre-processing the data

Next, we load the dataset, just as we did in Chapter 3, Signal Processing – Data Analysis with Neural Networks. We also take the...