Gaining an Intuition for Neural Networks

Neural Networks are quite confusing, especially when you are programming them from scratch. This article will give you an intuition for the relevant concepts necessary for the neural network to work, by creating and training a univariate regression model, with one synapse, between the input and output. Imagine you are a doctor, and you want to find a quantitative relationship between height and weight: That is, you want to be able to reliably predict the weight of someone, given their height. So far, you have data on 5 people's height and weight. When we look at this graph, we can visualize a line that best explains the data, but we want to quantify this.