Tensorflow

This week, we introduce the Tensorflow ecosystem for tackling AI and deep learning problems. The notebooks below can be run locally or using the Google Colab links at the top of each notebook.

import tensorflow as tf
mnist = tf.keras.datasets.mnist

(x_train, y_train),(x_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
x_train, x_test = x_train / 255.0, x_test / 255.0

model = tf.keras.models.Sequential([
  tf.keras.layers.Flatten(input_shape=(28, 28)),
  tf.keras.layers.Dense(512, activation=tf.nn.relu),
  tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.2),
  tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation=tf.nn.softmax)
])
model.compile(optimizer='adam',
              loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy',
              metrics=['accuracy'])

model.fit(x_train, y_train, epochs=5)
model.evaluate(x_test, y_test)

Notebooks

  • **Basic Classification**: This guide trains a neural network model to classify images of clothing, like sneakers and shirts. It’s okay if you don’t understand all the details, this is a fast-paced overview of a complete TensorFlow program with the details explained as we go.
  • **Text Classification**: This notebook classifies movie reviews as positive or negative using the text of the review. This is an example of binary—or two-class—classification, an important and widely applicable kind of machine learning problem.

We’ll use the IMDB dataset that contains the text of 50,000 movie reviews from the Internet Movie Database. These are split into 25,000 reviews for training and 25,000 reviews for testing. The training and testing sets are balanced, meaning they contain an equal number of positive and negative reviews.

  • **Basic Regression**: In a regression problem, we aim to predict the output of a continuous value, like a price or a probability. Contrast this with a classification problem, where we aim to select a class from a list of classes (for example, where a picture contains an apple or an orange, recognizing which fruit is in the picture).

This notebook uses the classic Auto MPG Dataset and builds a model to predict the fuel efficiency of late-1970s and early 1980s automobiles. To do this, we’ll provide the model with a description of many automobiles from that time period. This description includes attributes like: cylinders, displacement, horsepower, and weight.

  • **Overfit and Underfit**: As always, the code in this example will use the tf.keras API, which you can learn more about in the TensorFlow Keras guide.

In both of the previous examples—classifying movie reviews, and predicting fuel efficiency—we saw that the accuracy of our model on the validation data would peak after training for a number of epochs, and would then start decreasing.

In other words, our model would overfit to the training data. Learning how to deal with overfitting is important. Although it’s often possible to achieve high accuracy on the training set, what we really want is to develop models that generalize well to a testing data (or data they haven’t seen before).

The opposite of overfitting is underfitting. Underfitting occurs when there is still room for improvement on the test data. This can happen for a number of reasons: If the model is not powerful enough, is over-regularized, or has simply not been trained long enough. This means the network has not learned the relevant patterns in the training data.

If you train for too long though, the model will start to overfit and learn patterns from the training data that don’t generalize to the test data. We need to strike a balance. Understanding how to train for an appropriate number of epochs as we’ll explore below is a useful skill.

To prevent overfitting, the best solution is to use more training data. A model trained on more data will naturally generalize better. When that is no longer possible, the next best solution is to use techniques like regularization. These place constraints on the quantity and type of information your model can store. If a network can only afford to memorize a small number of patterns, the optimization process will force it to focus on the most prominent patterns, which have a better chance of generalizing well.

In this notebook, we’ll explore two common regularization techniques—weight regularization and dropout—and use them to improve our IMDB movie review classification notebook.

  • **Saving Models**: Model progress can be saved during—and after—training. This means a model can resume where it left off and avoid long training times. Saving also means you can share your model and others can recreate your work. When publishing research models and techniques, most machine learning practitioners share:
  • code to create the model, and
  • the trained weights, or parameters, for the model

Sharing this data helps others understand how the model works and try it themselves with new data.

[ ]: