How to save histogram plots from Tensorboard 2 to disk, just like you can do with scalars?

Question

I am using Tensorboard 2 to visualize my training data and I am able to save scalar plots to disk. However, I am unable to find a way to do this for histogram plots (tf.summary.histogram).

Is it possible to save histogram plots from Tensorboard 2 to disk, just like it is possible to do with scalars? I have looked through the documentation and it seems like this is not supported, but I wanted to confirm with the community before giving up. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There is an open issue to add a download button for histograms. However, this issue is open for more than 4 years, so I doubt it is getting resolved soon.

A workaround is to use the url that tensorboard would use to get the data. A short example:

# writing some data to tensorboard
from torch.utils.tensorboard import SummaryWriter
import numpy as np

writer = SummaryWriter('./tmp')

writer.add_histogram('hist', np.arange(10), 0)

Open tensorboard in the browser (here localhost:6006):

Get data as JSON using the template
http://<tb-host>/data/plugin/histograms/histograms?run=<run-name>&tag=<tag-name>.
Here http://localhost:6006/data/plugin/histograms/histograms/?run=.&tag=hist:

Now you can download the data as JSON.
Quick comparison with matplotlib:

import pandas as pd
import json
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

with open('histograms.json', 'r') as f:
    d = pd.DataFrame(json.load(f)[0][2])

fix, axes = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(10, 3))
axes[0].bar(d[1], d[2])
axes[0].set_title('tb')

axes[1].hist(data)
axes[1].set_title('original')