What is Tensorflow?

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

TensorFlow is an open-source software library. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well!

Let us first try to understand what the word TensorFlow actually mean!

TensorFlow is basically a software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs where:

  • nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations.
  • edges in the graph represent the multidimensional data arrays (called tensors) communicated between them. (Please note that tensor is the central unit of data in TensorFlow).

Variables

  • TensorFlow has Variable nodes too which can hold variable data. They are mainly used to hold and update parameters of a training model.
  • Variables are in-memory buffers containing tensors. They must be explicitly initialized and can be saved to disk during and after training. You can later restore saved values to exercise or analyze the model.
  • A constant’s value is stored in the graph and its value is replicated wherever the graph is loaded. A variable is stored separately, and may live on a parameter server.