Softmax on Digits Data with TensorFlow

In this tutorial, we will basically follow the official tutorial but will change some parts to make it easier to understand. The contents about logistic regression borrows from Arindam Banerjee’s Machine Learning course at University of Minnesota, which corresponds to Ethem Alpaydin’s book Introduction to machine learning.

The corresponding executable python code of this tutorial can be found here.

TensorFlow provides a very creative frame for machine learning programming. We will first build a structure (graph) for the algorithm and then feed the data and run the session. In the graph, the operations are the vertices and data flows on the edges.

Softmax

In short, Softmax is the multi-class logistic discrimination. For a linear discrimination, the discriminant function is defined as:

$$g(\mathbf{x}) = \mathbf{w}^T\mathbf{x} + w_0$$
This somehow assumes a linear relation from the features to the probability of each class. In comparison, the logistic regression assumes the log of the ration between two classes has a linear form, which is
$$\log \left( \frac{P(1|\mathbf{x})}{P(0|\mathbf{x})} \right) = \mathbf{w}^T\mathbf{x}$$
A direct calculation gives: