tf.SparseTensor

class tf.SparseTensor

Represents a sparse tensor.

TensorFlow represents a sparse tensor as three separate dense tensors: indices, values, and shape. In Python, the three tensors are collected into a SparseTensor class for ease of use. If you have separate indices, values, and shape tensors, wrap them in a SparseTensor object before passing to the ops below.

Concretely, the sparse tensor SparseTensor(indices, values, shape) comprises the following components, where N and ndims are the number of values and number of dimensions in the SparseTensor, respectively:

• indices: A 2-D int64 tensor of shape [N, ndims], which specifies the indices of the elements in the sparse tensor that contain nonzero values (elements are zero-indexed). For example, indices=[[1,3], [2,4]] specifies that the elements with indexes of [1,3] and [2,4] have nonzero values.

• values: A 1-D tensor of any type and shape [N], which supplies the values for each element in indices. For example, given indices=[[1,3], [2,4]], the parameter values=[18, 3.6] specifies that element [1,3] of the sparse tensor has a value of 18, and element [2,4] of the tensor has a value of 3.6.

• shape: A 1-D int64 tensor of shape [ndims], which specifies the shape of the sparse tensor. Takes a list indicating the number of elements in each dimension. For example, shape=[3,6] specifies a two-dimensional 3x6 tensor, shape=[2,3,4] specifies a three-dimensional 2x3x4 tensor, and shape=[9] specifies a one-dimensional tensor with 9 elements.

The corresponding dense tensor satisfies:

dense.shape = shape
dense[tuple(indices[i])] = values[i]

By convention, indices should be sorted in row-major order (or equivalently lexicographic order on the tuples indices[i]). This is not enforced when SparseTensor objects are constructed, but most ops assume correct ordering. If the ordering of sparse tensor st is wrong, a fixed version can be obtained by calling tf.sparse_reorder(st).

Example: The sparse tensor

SparseTensor(indices=[[0, 0], [1, 2]], values=[1, 2], shape=[3, 4])

represents the dense tensor

[[1, 0, 0, 0]
 [0, 0, 2, 0]
 [0, 0, 0, 0]]