For convenience we pickled the dataset to make it easier to use in python. It is available for
download here. The pickled file represents a tuple of 3 lists : the training set, the validation
set and the testing set. Each of the three lists is a pair formed from a list of images and a list
of class labels for each of the images. An image is represented as numpy 1-dimensional array of 784 (28 x 28) float values between 0 and 1 (0 stands for black, 1 for white). The labels are
numbers between 0 and 9 indicating which digit the image represents. The code block below
shows how to load the dataset.