Application of Artificial Intelligence on MNIST Dataset for Handwritten Digit Classification for Evaluation of Deep Learning Models

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Abstract
Handwritten digit classification represents a foundational task in computer vision and has been widely adopted in applications ranging from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to biometric authentication. Despite the availability of large benchmark datasets, the development of models that achieve both high accuracy and computational efficiency remains a central challenge. In this study, the performance of three representative machine learning paradigms—Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Feedforward Deep Neural Networks (FFDNNs)—was systematically evaluated on the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset. The assessment was conducted with a focus on classification accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability. Experimental results demonstrated that deep learning approaches substantially outperformed traditional Decision Tree (DT) methods. GANs and FFDNNs achieved classification accuracies of approximately 97%, indicating strong robustness and generalization capability for handwritten digit recognition tasks. In contrast, CHAID achieved only 29.61% accuracy, highlighting the limited suitability of DT models for high-dimensional image data. It was further observed that, despite the computational demand of adversarial training, GANs required less time per epoch than FFDNNs when executed on modern GPU architectures, thereby underscoring their potential scalability. These findings reinforce the importance of model selection in practical deployment, particularly where accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability must be jointly considered. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in pattern recognition by providing a comparative analysis of classical machine learning and deep learning approaches, thereby offering guidance for the development of reliable and efficient digit recognition systems suitable for real-world applications.

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