Create an Estimator from a Keras model

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Overview

TensorFlow Estimators are supported in TensorFlow, and can be created from new and existing tf.keras models. This tutorial contains a complete, minimal example of that process.

Setup

import tensorflow as tf

import numpy as np
import tensorflow_datasets as tfds

Create a simple Keras model.

In Keras, you assemble layers to build models. A model is (usually) a graph of layers. The most common type of model is a stack of layers: the tf.keras.Sequential model.

To build a simple, fully-connected network (i.e. multi-layer perceptron):

model = tf.keras.models.Sequential([
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(16, activation='relu', input_shape=(4,)),
    tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.2),
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(3)
])

Compile the model and get a summary.

model.compile(loss=tf.keras.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(from_logits=True),
              optimizer='adam')
model.summary()

Create an input function

Use the Datasets API to scale to large datasets or multi-device training.

Estimators need control of when and how their input pipeline is built. To allow this, they require an "Input function" or input_fn. The Estimator will call this function with no arguments. The input_fn must return a tf.data.Dataset.

def input_fn():
  split = tfds.Split.TRAIN
  dataset = tfds.load('iris', split=split, as_supervised=True)
  dataset = dataset.map(lambda features, labels: ({'dense_input':features}, labels))
  dataset = dataset.batch(32).repeat()
  return dataset

Test out your input_fn

for features_batch, labels_batch in input_fn().take(1):
  print(features_batch)
  print(labels_batch)

Create an Estimator from the tf.keras model.

A tf.keras.Model can be trained with the tf.estimator API by converting the model to an tf.estimator.Estimator object with tf.keras.estimator.model_to_estimator.

import tempfile
model_dir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
keras_estimator = tf.keras.estimator.model_to_estimator(
    keras_model=model, model_dir=model_dir)

Train and evaluate the estimator.

keras_estimator.train(input_fn=input_fn, steps=500)
eval_result = keras_estimator.evaluate(input_fn=input_fn, steps=10)
print('Eval result: {}'.format(eval_result))