Introduction to Tensors

Welcome back! After our initial foray into TensorFlow, we're taking a closer look at its backbone: Tensors. They aren't just fancy mathematical terms; they play a crucial role in almost every machine and deep learning workflow. Let's dive in.

What are Tensors?

Tensors can be seen as multi-dimensional arrays. Picture them as containers of data, housing values in a structured, N-dimensional format. You can think of them like the building blocks: individually, they might seem simple, but when put together, they can create complex structures.

Types of Tensors

You've actually met tensors before, especially if you've dealt with NumPy and Pandas libraries:

• Scalars: Just a single number. This is a 0-dimensional tensor. Example: 5;
• Vectors: An array of numbers. This is a 1-dimensional tensor. Example: [1, 2, 3];
• Matrices: A 2-dimensional tensor. Think of it as a grid of numbers. Example:

• 3D Tensors: If you stack matrices, you get 3D tensors;

Note

The 3D Tensor shown in the animation above can be represented as:

Each line corresponds to an individual matrix (2D Tensor).

• Higher Dimensions: And you can keep stacking for even higher dimensions.

The journey from a lower dimentional to higher dimentional tensors might look like a leap, but it's a natural progression when dealing with data structures. The deeper you go into neural network architectures, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the more you'll encounter these. The complexity increases, but remember, at their core, they're just data containers.

Significance in Deep Learning

The emphasis on tensors in deep learning arises from their uniformity and efficiency. They provide a consistent structure, enabling mathematical operations to perform seamlessly, especially on GPUs. When dealing with different data forms in neural networks, like images or sound, tensors streamline data representation, ensuring shape, hierarchy, and order are maintained.

Basic Tensor Creation

There are numerous ways to create a tensor in TensorFlow, ranging from generating random or structured data to importing data from a predefined dataset or even a file. However, for now, let's focus on the most straightforward method - creating a tensor from a Python list.