How to read MNIST database in R?

Question

I\'m currently working on a case study for which I need to work on the MNIST database.
The files in this site are said to be in IDX file format. I tried to take a look at th

Answer 1

endian="big", not "high":

> to.read = file("~/Downloads/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte", "rb")

magic number:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 2051

number of images:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 10000

number of rows:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 28

number of columns:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 28

here comes the data:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 0
> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=1, endian="big")
[1] 0

as per the training set image data description on the web site.

Now you just need to loop and read 28*28 byte chunks into matrices.

Start again:

 > to.read = file("~/Downloads/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte", "rb")

skip header:

> readBin(to.read, integer(), n=4, endian="big")
[1]  2051 10000    28    28

should really get the 28,28 from the header read but hard-coded here:

 > m = matrix(readBin(to.read,integer(), size=1, n=28*28, endian="big"),28,28)
 > image(m)

Might need to transpose or flip the matrix, I think its an upside-down "7".

par(mfrow=c(5,5))
par(mar=c(0,0,0,0))
for(i in 1:25){m = matrix(readBin(to.read,integer(), size=1, n=28*28, endian="big"),28,28);image(m[,28:1])}

gets you:

Oh, and google leads me to: http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/darch/docs/readMNIST which might be useful.