What is the role of “Flatten” in Keras?

Question

I am trying to understand the role of the Flatten function in Keras. Below is my code, which is a simple two-layer network. It takes in 2-dimensional data of sh

Answer 1

If you read the Keras documentation entry for Dense, you will see that this call:

Dense(16, input_shape=(5,3))

would result in a Dense network with 3 inputs and 16 outputs which would be applied independently for each of 5 steps. So, if D(x) transforms 3 dimensional vector to 16-d vector, what you'll get as output from your layer would be a sequence of vectors: [D(x[0,:]), D(x[1,:]),..., D(x[4,:])] with shape (5, 16). In order to have the behavior you specify you may first Flatten your input to a 15-d vector and then apply Dense:

model = Sequential()
model.add(Flatten(input_shape=(3, 2)))
model.add(Dense(16))
model.add(Activation('relu'))
model.add(Dense(4))
model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error', optimizer='SGD')

EDIT: As some people struggled to understand - here you have an explaining image: