The MNIST dataset is made available here to avoid making unnecessary queries to original source. It has a training and test sets of 60k and 10k examples respectively. Features and labels of training and test sets are stored under two numpy files: train.npy, test.npy. For example, train.npy contains x_train, y_train arrays for features and labels respectively.

Original dataset can be downloaded from: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner. "Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition." Proceedings of the IEEE, 86(11):2278-2324, November 1998.

Yann LeCun and Corinna Cortes hold the copyright of MNIST dataset, which is a derivative work from original NIST datasets. MNIST dataset is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.