Loading a dataset from my local folder

Question

I'm following the example in this tutorial.

Instead of loading the dataset as follows:

dataset = datasets.fetch_mldata("MNIST Original")

How can I load my dataset from my "local" folder? Is there a specific structure for the data in order to use it in the example?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think the answer is already found in the page you provided

We make a call to the fetch_mldata function on Line 13 that downloads the original MNIST dataset from the mldata.org repository.

The actual dataset is roughly 55mb so it may take a few seconds to download. However, once the dataset is downloaded it is cached locally on your machine so you will not have to download it again

It'll load the dataset once, then use the locally cached copy.

Source: http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2014/09/22/getting-started-deep-learning-python/

EDIT: There's some information on http://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/mldata.html, e.g.

The MNIST database contains a total of 70000 examples of handwritten digits of size 28x28 pixels, labeled from 0 to 9

and

After the first download, the dataset is cached locally in the path specified by the data_home keyword argument, which defaults to ~/scikit_learn_data/