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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

snedata 0.0.0.9003

July 16 2026:

  • New functions: download_coil20(), download_coil100(), and show_coil_object() for the COIL-20 and COIL-100 image datasets. Downloading the data requires installing the optional png package. This functionality formerly lived in the coil20 repo.
  • Improved validation and cleanup of downloaded binary data and archives.
  • Improved validation of synthetic data generators.
  • Fixed QMNIST broken links due to project being archived.
  • download_mammoth10k() and download_mammoth50k() now both return coordinates in X, Y, Z column order. Code that selected Mammoth coordinates by position should be updated to use the canonical order.
  • All network dataset downloaders now have a configurable timeout argument, defaulting to 30 minutes. Their downloads preserve an already-larger global R timeout and restore it afterward.
  • as = "matrix" from 0.0.0.9002 has been changed to as = "list" and used by all relevant dataset functions.
  • synthetic_hierarchical_data() adds colors = "macro", and colors = "none" arguments, which do not require the colorspace dependency to be installed.
  • synthetic_hierarchical_data(colors = "full") and COIL downloaders now fail fast if optional dependencies are not installed, before generating data or starting a download.
  • Fixed non-unique document identifiers returned by download_twenty_newsgroups(). Id now has the form subset/newsgroup/filename, while FileId preserves the original character filename.
  • helix(nwinds) now requires a positive integer so it always forms a closed curve as documented.

snedata 0.0.0.9002

July 2 2026: Version 0.0.9002 is released, featuring:

  • a lot of tidying up, especially around cleaning up temp files and network connections.
  • instead of a dataframe, for some larger datasets, you can now return a list containing the matrix of the numeric data and any labels separately. Supply as = "matrix".
  • “new” datasets: The swiss roll and faces dataset from the Isomap paper, via download_isomap_swiss_roll and download_isomap_faces, respectively. Also, a function to view items in the faces dataset via show_isomap_face. Probably of historical interest only, but I think we should preserve this history. Now vanished from the MIT webpage, one must rummage through the Internet Archive, and have the optional R.matlab package installed. The faces dataset is stored as a Unix compress file, so you also need an external gzip or uncompress command (I tried and failed to get this to work with the archive package). Based on a gist I wrote a few years ago.
  • new(er) dataset: synthetic_hierarchical_data() generates the 5 x 5 x 5 hierarchical Gaussian cluster data set used in the PaCMAP paper.

snedata 0.0.0.9001 and earlier

March 2 2025 New link to download the MNIST digits. The original pages on Yann LeCun’s website seem to have gone kaput. Fortunately https://github.com/fgnt/mnist maintained a mirror.

November 25 2023 Added the 20 Newsgroups text dataset. You’ll need to look at packages like tm or tidytext to process this into a form suitable for embedding.

May 14 2022 Added the taspheres function to generate the “spheres” dataset of high dimensional spheres nested inside a larger sphere, as used in the Topological Autoencoders paper.

December 24 2021. Added the S-curve with a hole and 2D curve datasets used in the PaCMAP paper.

December 21 2021. Added the mammoth datasets from Understanding UMAP.

June 29 2019. Added QMNIST.

March 6 2019. Added CIFAR-10.

February 23 2019. Added Small NORB.

December 14 2018. Added Kuzushiji-MNIST.