MATLAB vs. TensorFlow

MATLAB really does best for solving computational problems in math and engineering. Especially when you have to use a lot of functions in your solving process, or if you have a nonlinear equation that must be iteratively solved. [MATLAB] can also perform things like integration and derivation on your equations that you put into it.

Incentivized

TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).

Incentivized

• It has a very user friendly library which helps users learn this software fairly quickly in a short span of time.
• The graphical user interface provided by the software is really good.
• The code that a person writes allows options for debugging.
• One can visualize the flow of control of their code inside MATLAB.

Incentivized

• A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
• Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
• Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.

Incentivized

• MatLab is pricier than most of its competitors and because of this reason, many organizations are moving towards cheaper alternatives - mostly Python.
• MatLab is inefficient when it comes to performing a large number of iterations. It gets laggy and often crashes. Python is better in this regard.
• There is a limited number of hardware options (mostly NI) that can be connected directly to the data acquisition toolbox.

Incentivized

• RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
• Cannot handle sequence inputs
• Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.

MATLAB is pretty easy to use. You can extend its capabilities using the programming interface. Very flexible capabilities when it comes to graphical presentation of your data (so many different kinds of options for your plotting needs). Anytime you are working with large data sets, or with matrices, MATLAB is likely to be very helpful.

Incentivized

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

Incentivized

The built-in search engine is not as performing as I wish it would be. However, the YouTube channel has a vast library of informative video that can help understanding the software. Also, many other software have a nice bridge into MATLAB, which makes it very versatile. Overall, the support for MATLAB is good.

Incentivized

Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.

Incentivized

Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

Incentivized

How MATLAB compares to its competition or similar open access tools like R (programming language) or SciLab is that it's simply more powerful and capable. It embraces a wider spectrum of possibilities for far more fields than any other environment. R, for example, is intended primarily for the area of statistical computing. SciLab, on the other hand, is a similar open access tool that falls very short in its computing capabilities. It's much slower when running larger scripts and isn't documented or supported nearly as well as MATLAB.

Incentivized

Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice

Incentivized

• MATLAB helps us quickly sort through large sets of data because we keep the same script each time we run an analyzation, making it very efficient to run this whole process.
• The software makes it super easy for us to create plots that we can then show to investors or clients to display our data.
• We are also looking to create an app for our product, and we will not be able to do that on MATLAB, therefore creating a limiting issue and a new learning curve for a programming language.

Incentivized

• Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
• Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
• Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.

Incentivized