How to use datasets.fetch_mldata() in sklearn?

Question

I am trying to run the following code for a brief machine learning algorithm:

import re
import argparse
import csv
from collections import Counter
from sklea         


        

Answer 1

I was also getting a fetch_mldata() "IOError: could not read bytes" error. Here is the solution; the relevant lines of code are

from sklearn.datasets.mldata import fetch_mldata
mnist = fetch_mldata('mnist-original', data_home='/media/Vancouver/apps/mnist_dataset/')

... be sure to change 'data_home' for your preferred location (directory).

Here is a script:

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding: utf-8

# Source:
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19530383/how-to-use-datasets-fetch-mldata-in-sklearn
# ... modified, below, by Victoria

"""
pers. comm. (Jan 27, 2016) from MLdata.org MNIST dataset contactee "Cheng Ong:"

    The MNIST data is called 'mnist-original'. The string you pass to sklearn
    has to match the name of the URL:

    from sklearn.datasets.mldata import fetch_mldata
    data = fetch_mldata('mnist-original')
"""

def get_data():

    """
    Get MNIST data; returns a dict with keys 'train' and 'test'.
    Both have the keys 'X' (features) and 'y' (labels)
    """

    from sklearn.datasets.mldata import fetch_mldata

    mnist = fetch_mldata('mnist-original', data_home='/media/Vancouver/apps/mnist_dataset/')

    x = mnist.data
    y = mnist.target

    # Scale data to [-1, 1]
    x = x/255.0*2 - 1

    from sklearn.cross_validation import train_test_split

    x_train, x_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(x, y,
        test_size=0.33, random_state=42)

    data = {'train': {'X': x_train, 'y': y_train},
            'test': {'X': x_test, 'y': y_test}}

    return data

data = get_data()
print '\n', data, '\n'