What does the standard Keras model output mean? What is epoch and loss in Keras?

Just to answer the questions more specifically, here's a definition of epoch and loss:

Epoch: A full pass over all of your training data.

For example, in your view above, you have 1213 observations. So an epoch concludes when it has finished a training pass over all 1213 of your observations.

Loss: A scalar value that we attempt to minimize during our training of the model. The lower the loss, the closer our predictions are to the true labels.

This is usually Mean Squared Error (MSE) as David Maust said above, or often in Keras, Categorical Cross Entropy

What you'd expect to see from running fit on your Keras model, is a decrease in loss over n number of epochs. Your training run is rather abnormal, as your loss is actually increasing. This could be due to a learning rate that is too large, which is causing you to overshoot optima.

As jaycode mentioned, you will want to look at your model's performance on unseen data, as this is the general use case of Machine Learning.

As such, you should include a list of metrics in your compile method, which could look like:

model.compile(optimizer='rmsprop', loss='categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy'])

As well as run your model on validation during the fit method, such as:

model.fit(data, labels, validation_split=0.2)

There's a lot more to explain, but hopefully this gets you started.

One epoch ends when your model had run the data through all nodes in your network and ready to update the weights to reach optimal loss value. That is, smaller is better. In your case, as there are higher loss scores on higher epoch, it "seems" the model is better on first epoch.

I said "seems" since we can't actually tell for sure yet as the model has not been tested using proper cross validation method i.e. it is evaluated only against its training data.

Ways to improve your model:

• Use cross validation in your Keras model in order to find out how the model actually perform, does it generalize well when predicting new data it has never seen before?
• Adjust your learning rate, structure of neural network model, number of hidden units / layers, init, optimizer, and activator parameters used in your model among myriad other things.

Combining sklearn's GridSearchCV with Keras can automate this process.