This package makes the MNIST dataset easily accessible in R.
It also provides a few convenience functions, some of them taken from this gist by brendano.
The package cannot be made available on the CRAN (the dataset is not open source, some of the code included is copyrighted), but can be installed easily with devtool (make sure you follow the full instructions to get started):
install.packages("devtools")
library("devtools")
devtools::install_github("xrobin/mnist")
The first time the package is loaded, the mnist
dataset is automatically downloaded from the MNIST database and loaded into the global environment. Subsequently the dataset is simply loaded into the global environment.
library(mnist)
str(mnist)
plot.mnist()
?mnist