The MNIST dataset, or Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology dataset, is a widely-used collection of handwritten digits designed for training and testing image classification systems. It includes 60,000 training images and 10,000 testing images, all of which are grayscale and 28x28 pixels in size.

It was created by "re-mixing" the samples from NIST's original datasets. The creators felt that since NIST's training dataset was taken from American Census Bureau employees, while the testing dataset was taken from American high school students, it was not well-suited for machine learning experiments. Furthermore, the black and white images from NIST were normalized to fit into a 28x28 pixel bounding box and anti-aliased, which introduced grayscale levels.

The MNIST database contains 60,000 training images and 10,000 testing images.[8] Half of the training set and half of the test set were taken from NIST's training dataset, while the other half of the training set and the other half of the test set were taken from NIST's testing dataset. The original creators of the database keep a list of some of the methods tested on it. In their original paper, they use a support-vector machine to get an error rate of 0.8%.

The original MNIST dataset contains at least 4 wrong labels.

Four files are available: train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz: training set images (9912422 bytes) train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz: training set labels (28881 bytes) t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz: test set images (1648877 bytes) t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz: test set labels (4542 bytes)