We propose a method to construct a tensor network representation of partition
functions without singular value decompositions nor series expansions. The
approach is demonstrated for one- and two-dimensional Ising models and we study
the dependence of the tensor renormalization group (TRG) on the form of the
initial tensors and their symmetries. We further introduce variants of several
tensor renormalization algorithms. Our benchmarks reveal a significant
dependence of various TRG algorithms on the choice of initial tensors and their
symmetries. However, we show that the boundary TRG technique can eliminate the
initial tensor dependence for all TRG methods. The numerical results of TRG
calculations can thus be made significantly more robust with only a few changes
in the code. Furthermore, we study a three-dimensional
Z2 gauge
theory without gauge-fixing and confirm the applicability of the initial tensor
construction. Our method can straightforwardly be applied to systems with
longer range and multi-site interactions, such as the next-nearest neighbor
Ising model.