Exercise:Vectorization

Now that you have vectorized the code, it is easy to learn larger sets of features on medium sized images. In this part of the exercise, you will use your sparse autoencoder to learn features for handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset.  This is a large enough data set that running your older, unvectorized implementation would have been painfully slow.  

The MNIST data is available at [http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/]. Download the file <tt>train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz</tt> and decompress it. After obtaining the source images, you should use [[Using the MNIST Dataset | helper functions that we provide]] to load the data into Matlab as matrices. While the helper functions that we provide will load both the input examples <math>x</math> and the class labels <math>y</math>, for this assignment, you will only need the input examples <math>x</math> since the sparse autoencoder is an ''unsupervised'' learning algorithm.  (In a later assignment, we will use the labels <math>y</math> as well.)