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What do you mean with 'imperative style programming'?

• jimfleming 9y ago
  Here imperative style means you can use language constructs in e.g. Python, such as if-statements and while-loops, to directly construct models. TensorFlow, Theano, and other graph-based frameworks typically require creating branches and loops as nodes in the graph. Graphs have advantages but they can be unfamiliar and sometimes difficult: Some advantages: easier to serialize the whole graph and distribute computation; optimization can also be performed across the graph nodes (e.g. see XLA in TensorFlow). Some disadvantages: it can be more difficult to write and reason about, particularly for recurrent neural networks which can utilize loops a lot; also interop with reinforcement learning environments where much of the computation is performed in an environment outside of the graph.