On Linear Separability of the MNIST Handwritten Digits Dataset
The MNIST dataset containing thousands of handwritten digit images is still a fundamental benchmark for evaluating various pattern-recognition and image-classification models. Linear separability is a key concept in many statistical and machine-learning techniques. Despite the long history of the MNIST dataset and its relative simplicity in size and resolution, the question of whether the dataset is linearly separable has never been fully answered -- scientific and informal sources share conflicting claims. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive empirical investigation to address this question, distinguishing pairwise and one-vs-rest separation of the training, the test and the combin...
| Authors | Ákos Hajnal |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 March 2026 |
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