[Tensorflow 101] What does it mean to reduce axis?

i.e. reduce_sum, reduce_max, reduce_mean, etc.

Aerin Kim ๐Ÿ™
Sep 5, 2018 ยท 3 min read

In Tensorflow code, you may have seen โ€œreduce_*โ€ many times. When I first used tf.reduce_sum, I thought, if itโ€™s a sum, just say sum! Why do you have to put the prefix โ€œreduce_โ€ in front of every command?

Soon I realized it was because every time you do a sum, max, mean, etc., it inherently reduces theโ€ฆ

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Aerin Kim ๐Ÿ™

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Iโ€™m a Research Engineer at Microsoft AI Research and this is my notepad for Applied Math / CS / Deep Learning topics. Follow me on Twitter for more!

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