Loading data – MNIST

Before we can even begin to train or build our model, we first need to get some data. As it turns out, a lot of people have made data available online for us to use for this purpose. One of the best-curated datasets around is MNIST, which we will use for the first two examples in this chapter.

We'll learn how to download MNIST and load it into our Go program so that we can use it in our model.

What is MNIST?

Throughout this chapter, we're going to make use of a popular dataset called the MNIST database. This has been made available by Yann LeCun, Corinna Cortes, and Christopher Burges at http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist.

The database gets its name from the fact that it was made by mixing...