Deep Learning With TensorFlow: A Review

This review covers the core concepts and design decisions of TensorFlow. TensorFlow, originally created by researchers at Google, is the most popular one among the plethora of deep learning libraries. In the field of deep learning, neural networks have achieved tremendous success and gained wide popularity in various areas. This family of models also has tremendous potential to promote data analysis and modeling for various problems in educational and behavioral sciences given its flexibility and scalability. We give the reader an overview of the basics of neural network models such as the multilayer perceptron, the convolutional neural network, and stochastic gradient descent, the most commonly used optimization method for neural network models. However, the implementation of these models and optimization algorithms is time-consuming and error-prone. Fortunately, TensorFlow greatly eases and accelerates the research and application of neural network models. We review several core concepts of TensorFlow such as graph construction functions, graph execution tools, and TensorFlow’s visualization tool, TensorBoard. Then, we apply these concepts to build and train a convolutional neural network model to classify handwritten digits. This review is concluded by a comparison of low- and high-level application programming interfaces and a discussion of graphical processing unit support, distributed training, and probabilistic modeling with TensorFlow Probability library.