Visualising the MNIST numbers data

Keras comes with some built in functions to obtain the MNIST dataset created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As far as I can tell, it's not possible to get access to these from within RapidMiner but never fear, here is a process that can do it.

It uses R and obviously requires Keras to be have been installed. I'll leave that to the reader to get right.

The process also chooses one of the digits and casts it into a form that allows it to be displayed. It does this using the "Windowing" operator followed by "De-Pivot" to transform the matrix like data into x,y,z tuples.

Here's the 6th digit displayed using a block chart. This looks like a 2.

I've already used R with Keras to create a classifier that can recognise these digits. This is my first step towards using Keras in RapidMiner to build a classifier to do the same job.