The difference between sigmoid and tanh

Sigmoid function and tanh function are two activation functions used in deep learning. Also, they look very similar to each other. In this article, I’d like to have a quick comparison.

Sigmoid function

tanh function

Difference

The difference can be seen from the picture below. Sigmoid function has a range of 0 to 1, while tanh function has a range of -1 to 1. “In fact, tanh function is a scaled sigmoid function!”

The red one is sigmoid and the green one is the tanh function

Reference

https://medium.com/the-theory-of-everything/understanding-activation-functions-in-neural-networks-9491262884e0