## Usage of callbacks

A callback is a set of functions to be applied at given stages of the training procedure. You can use callbacks to get a view on internal states and statistics of the model during training. You can pass a list of callbacks (as the keyword argument `callbacks`) to the `.fit()` method of the `Sequential` model. The relevant methods of the callbacks will then be called at each stage of the training. 

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# Create a callback

You can create a custom callback by extending the base class `keras.callbacks.Callback`. A callback has access to its associated model through the class property `self.model`.

Here's a simple example saving a list of losses over each batch during training:
```python
class LossHistory(keras.callbacks.Callback):
    def on_train_begin(self, logs={}):
        self.losses = []

    def on_batch_end(self, batch, logs={}):
        self.losses.append(logs.get('loss'))
```

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### Example: recording loss history

```python
class LossHistory(keras.callbacks.Callback):
    def on_train_begin(self, logs={}):
        self.losses = []

    def on_batch_end(self, batch, logs={}):
        self.losses.append(logs.get('loss'))

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(10, input_dim=784, init='uniform'))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='rmsprop')

history = LossHistory()
model.fit(X_train, Y_train, batch_size=128, nb_epoch=20, verbose=0, callbacks=[history])

print history.losses
# outputs
'''
[0.66047596406559383, 0.3547245744908703, ..., 0.25953155204159617, 0.25901699725311789]
'''
```

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### Example: model checkpoints

```python
from keras.callbacks import ModelCheckpoint

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(10, input_dim=784, init='uniform'))
model.add(Activation('softmax'))
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='rmsprop')

'''
saves the model weights after each epoch if the validation loss decreased
'''
checkpointer = ModelCheckpoint(filepath="/tmp/weights.hdf5", verbose=1, save_best_only=True)
model.fit(X_train, Y_train, batch_size=128, nb_epoch=20, verbose=0, validation_data=(X_test, Y_test), callbacks=[checkpointer])

```