Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

Importing the UCI ML handwritten digits dataset

While we will be using the MNIST dataset as in Chapter 04, Advanced Matplotlib (since we will be demonstrating visualization along with model building in machine learning), we will take a shortcut to speed up the training process. Instead of using the 60,000 images with 28x28 pixels each, we will import another similar dataset of 8x8-pixel images from the scikit-learn package. 

This dataset is obtained from the University of California, Irvine Machine Learning Repository, found at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Optical+Recognition+of+Handwritten+Digits. It is a preprocessed version of images of digits written by 43 people, with 30 and 13 contributing to the training and testing set respectively.  ...