# 13.4.1 USPS dataset

The dataset and this description is made available on
http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/data.html.

The dataset refers to numeric data obtained from the scanning of handwritten digits from envelopes by the U.S. Postal Service. The original scanned digits are binary and of different sizes and orientations; the images here have been deslanted and size normalized, resulting in 16 x 16 grayscale images (Le Cun et al., 1990).

There are 7291 training observations and 2007 test observations, distributed as follows:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Total
Train 1194 1005 731 658 652 556 664 645 542 644 7291
Test 359 264 198 166 200 160 170 147 166 177 2007

or as proportions:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Train 0.16 0.14 0.1 0.09 0.09 0.08 0.09 0.09 0.07 0.09
Test 0.18 0.13 0.1 0.08 0.10 0.08 0.08 0.07 0.08 0.09

The test set is notoriously "difficult", and a 2.5% error rate is excellent. This is a notorious example of multiclass classifiction task where $\mathbf y\in { 0,1,\dots ,9}$ and the inputs are real vectors.