Programming Machine Learning

Data Come First

Before we feed data to our ML system, let’s get up close and personal with those data. This section tells you all you need to know about MNIST.

Getting to Know MNIST

MNIST is a collection of labeled images that’s been assembled specifically for supervised learning. Its name stands for “Modified NIST,” because it’s a remix of earlier data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. MNIST contains images of handwritten digits, labeled with their numerical values. Here are a few random images, capped by their labels:

Digits are made up of 28 by 28 grayscale pixels, each represented by one byte. In MNIST’s grayscale, 0 stands ...