TensorFlow for binary classification

The original MNIST example uses a one-hot encoding to represent the labels in the data: this means that if there are NLABELS = 10 classes (as in MNIST), the target output is [1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0] for class 0, [0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0] for class 1, etc. The tf.nn.softmax() operator converts the logits computed by tf.matmul(x, W) + b into a probability distribution across the different output classes, which is then compared to the fed-in value for y_.

If NLABELS = 1, this acts as if there were only a single class, and the tf.nn.softmax() op would compute a probability of 1.0 for that class, leading to a cross-entropy of 0.0, since tf.log(1.0) is 0.0 for all of the examples.

There are (at least) two approaches you could try for binary classification:

1. The simplest would be to set NLABELS = 2 for the two possible classes, and encode your training data as [1 0] for label 0 and [0 1] for label 1. This answer has a suggestion for how to do that.

2. You could keep the labels as integers 0 and 1 and use tf.nn.sparse_softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(), as suggested in this answer.