This repo contains a deep belief network of restricted boltzmann machines. The RBM's allow for sparsity and many other options.
Deep-learning repository contains a submodule, python-mnist, which reads the mnist dataset. Be sure to clone this repo with the --recursive option. If the repo has already been clone then execute the command in the root directory: git submodule update --init --recursive
The examples folder contains an network which trains an algorithm to classify handwritten digits from the mnist dataset.