tensorflow Getting started with tensorflow Basic Example

Example

Tensorflow is more than just a deep learning framework. It is a general computation framework to perform general mathematical operations in a parallel and distributed manner. An example of such is described below.

Linear Regression

A basic statistical example that is commonly utilized and is rather simple to compute is fitting a line to a dataset. The method to do so in tensorflow is described below in code and comments.

The main steps of the (TensorFlow) script are:

1. Declare placeholders (x_ph, y_ph) and variables (W, b)
2. Define the initialization operator (init)
3. Declare operations on the placeholders and variables (y_pred, loss, train_op)
4. Create a session (sess)
5. Run the initialization operator (sess.run(init))
6. Run some graph operations (e.g. sess.run([train_op, loss], feed_dict={x_ph: x, y_ph: y}))

The graph construction is done using the Python TensorFlow API (could also be done using the C++ TensorFlow API). Running the graph will call low-level C++ routines.

'''
function: create a linear model which try to fit the line 
          y = x + 2 using SGD optimizer to minimize 
          root-mean-square(RMS) loss function

'''
import tensorflow as tf
import numpy as np

# number of epoch
num_epoch = 100

# training data x and label y
x = np.array([0., 1., 2., 3.], dtype=np.float32)
y = np.array([2., 3., 4., 5.], dtype=np.float32)

# convert x and y to 4x1 matrix
x = np.reshape(x, [4, 1])
y = np.reshape(y, [4, 1])

# test set(using a little trick)
x_test = x + 0.5
y_test = y + 0.5

# This part of the script builds the TensorFlow graph using the Python API

# First declare placeholders for input x and label y
# Placeholders are TensorFlow variables requiring to be explicitly fed by some 
# input data
x_ph = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, shape=[None, 1])
y_ph = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, shape=[None, 1])

# Variables (if not specified) will be learnt as the GradientDescentOptimizer
# is run
# Declare weight variable initialized using a truncated_normal law
W = tf.Variable(tf.truncated_normal([1, 1], stddev=0.1))
# Declare bias variable initialized to a constant 0.1
b = tf.Variable(tf.constant(0.1, shape=[1]))

# Initialize variables just declared 
init = tf.initialize_all_variables()

# In this part of the script, we build operators storing operations
# on the previous variables and placeholders.
# model: y = w * x + b
y_pred = x_ph * W + b

# loss function
loss = tf.mul(tf.reduce_mean(tf.square(tf.sub(y_pred, y_ph))), 1. / 2)
# create training graph
train_op = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.1).minimize(loss)

# This part of the script runs the TensorFlow graph (variables and operations
# operators) just built.
with tf.Session() as sess:
    # initialize all the variables by running the initializer operator
    sess.run(init)
    for epoch in xrange(num_epoch):
        # Run sequentially the train_op and loss operators with
        # x_ph and y_ph placeholders fed by variables x and y
        _, loss_val = sess.run([train_op, loss], feed_dict={x_ph: x, y_ph: y})
        print('epoch %d: loss is %.4f' % (epoch, loss_val))

    # see what model do in the test set
    # by evaluating the y_pred operator using the x_test data
    test_val = sess.run(y_pred, feed_dict={x_ph: x_test})
    print('ground truth y is: %s' % y_test.flatten())
    print('predict y is     : %s' % test_val.flatten())