MNIST data download from sklearn datasets gives Timeout error

Question

I am new to ML and trying to download MNIST data. The code I am using is:

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_mldata
mnist = fetch_mldata('MNIST original')

But, it gives an error saying:

TimeoutError: [WinError 10060] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond

Can anyone please help me what needs to be done to rectify this issue?

Answer 1

here is the issue and some workaround good people suggested :

https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/8588

easiest one was to download .mat file of MNIST with this download link:

download MNIST.mat

after download put the file inside ~/scikit_learn_data/mldata folder, if this folder doesn't exist create it and put the Mnist.mat inside it. when you have them locally scikit learn won't download it and uses that file.

Answer 2

Since fetch_mldata had been deprecated, we will have to move to fetch_openml. Make sure to update your scikit-learn to version 0.20.0 or up in order to get the openml work.

1. openml currently has 5 different datasets related to MNIST dataset. Here is one example from sklearn's document using the mnist-784 dataset.

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_openml
# Load data from https://www.openml.org/d/554
X, y = fetch_openml('mnist_784', version=1, return_X_y=True)

2. Or if you don't need a very large dataset, you can use load_digits:

from sklearn.datasets  import load_digits
mnist = load_digits()

Note that if you are following the book Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, with mnist-784 dataset, you may notice that the code

some_digit = X[36000]
some_digit_image = some_digit.reshape(28, 28)
plt.imshow(some_digit_image, cmap=matplotlib.cm.binary, interpolation="nearest")
plt.axis('off')
plt.show()

returns a picture of 9 instead of 5. I guess, it could either be that the mnist-784 and the mnist original are two subsets of the nist data, or the order of data is different between the two datasets.

PS: I had encountered some error about ssl when I was trying to load data, in my case I update openssl and the problem had been resolved.