On Tue, 06 Nov 2018 12:11:13 -0800, Robert Kern wrote:
> Popular, but quite misleading, in the same way that not every 2-dim array
> is a matrix. As someone who works on tensor machine learning methods once
> complained to me.
Are you referring to vectors, structured arrays, or something else?
I was responding to this statement by Chuck:
> I think the current popular terminology is `tensors` for `multidimensional arrays`.
Mostly popularized by Tensorflow. But the "tensors" that flow through Tensorflow are mostly just multidimensional arrays and have no tensor-algebraic meaning. Similarly, a 2-dim array (say, a grayscale intensity image) doesn't necessarily have a matrix-algebraic interpretation, either. A 640x480 grayscale image is not a linear transformation from RR^640 to RR^480. It's just a collection of numbers that are convenient to organize as a 2D grid.
This seems to be a pain point with some tensor methods ML researchers who have to explain their work to an audience that seems to think that Tensorflow must make their lives (and theses) easy. :-)