How to Build a Recurrent Neural Network in TensorFlow

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By Erik Hallström, Deep Learning Research Engineer.In this tutorial I’ll explain how to build a simple working Recurrent Neural Network in TensorFlow. This is the first in a series of seven parts where various aspects and techniques of building Recurrent Neural Networks in TensorFlow are covered. A short introduction to TensorFlow is available here. For now, let’s get started with the RNN!What is a RNN? It is short for “Recurrent Neural Network”, and is basically a neural network that can be used when your data is treated as a sequence, where the particular order of the data-points matter. More importantly, this sequence can be of arbitrary length.The most straight-forward example is perhaps a time-series of numbers, where the task is to predict the next value given previous values. The input to the RNN at every time-step is the current value as well as a state vector which represent what the network has “seen” at time-steps before. This state-vector is the encoded memory of the…