computation of test data in tensorflow tutorial

Question

I was going through the tutorial of tensorflow- https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.9/tutorials/mnist/beginners/index.html

import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow.examples.tutorials.mnist import input_data
mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("MNIST_data/", one_hot=True)
x = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 784])
W = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([784, 10]))    #weights
b = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([10]))         #bias   
y = tf.nn.softmax(tf.matmul(x, W) + b)
y_ = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 10])
cross_entropy = tf.reduce_mean(-tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y), reduction_indices=[1]))
train_step = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.5).minimize(cross_entropy)
init = tf.initialize_all_variables()
sess = tf.Session()
sess.run(init)
for i in range(1000):
  batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(100)
  sess.run(train_step, feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})
correct_prediction = tf.equal(tf.argmax(y,1), tf.argmax(y_,1))
accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(correct_prediction, tf.float32))
print(sess.run(accuracy, feed_dict={x: mnist.test.images, y_: mnist.test.labels}))

Towards the very end, we pass in test data to the placeholders. y_ is matrix containing true values. and y is the matrix with predicted values. My question is when is y computed for the test data. The W matrix has been trained by backpropagation. But this trained matrix must be multiplied with new input x (test data) to give the prediction y. Where does this happen?

Normally i have seen sequential execution of code, and in the last few lines, y isn't called explicitly.

Olivier Moindrot Olivier Moindrot · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-07T20:18:24

accuracy depends on correct_prediction which depends on y.

So when you call sess.run(accuracy, feed_dict={x: mnist.test.images, y_: mnist.test.labels}), y is computed before accuracy is computed. All this happen inside the TensorFlow graph.

The TensorFlow graph is the same for train and test. The only difference is the data you feed to the placeholders x and y_.

computation of test data in tensorflow tutorial

2 Answers