Dropout

DROPOUT is a widely used regularization technique that is specific to deep learning. 

It randomly shuts down some neurons in each iteration. 

At each iteration, you shut down (= set to zero) each neuron of a layer with probability 1−keep_prob or keep it with probability  keep_prob (50% here). 

The dropped neurons don't contribute to the training in both the forward and backward propagations of the iteration.

When you shut some neurons down, you actually modify your model. The idea behind drop-out is that at each iteration, you train a different model that uses only a subset of your neurons. With dropout, your neurons thus become less sensitive to the activation of one other specific neuron, because that other neuron might be shut down at any time.

• Dropout is a regularization technique.
• You only use dropout during training. Don't use dropout (randomly eliminate nodes) during test time.
• Apply dropout both during forward and backward propagation.
• During training time, divide each dropout layer by keep_prob to keep the same expected value for the activations. For example, if keep_prob is 0.5, then we will on average shut down half the nodes, so the output will be scaled by 0.5 since only the remaining half are contributing to the solution. Dividing by 0.5 is equivalent to multiplying by 2. Hence, the output now has the same expected value. You can check that this works even when keep_prob is other values than 0.5.