tanh

Units & Measurements abbreviation · Math

tanh
Stands forHyperbolic tangent
CategoriesUnits & Measurements

tanh stands for Hyperbolic tangent, a math abbreviation.

The ratio sinh x / cosh x, an S-shaped curve that rises smoothly from −1 to 1. It appears in physics, special relativity (rapidity) and neural networks as an activation function.

Example: Each hidden layer applies tanh to its weighted inputs.

Usage notes

In machine learning, tanh was a standard activation before ReLU became dominant; it is a rescaled logistic sigmoid, tanh(x) = 2σ(2x) − 1. Its output is centered on zero, which often helped training compared with the sigmoid. Pronounced "tanch" or "than".

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