Artificial Neural Network - an overview

ANN is a modeling technique inspired by the human nervous system that allows learning by example from representative data that describes a physical phenomenon or a decision process. A unique feature of ANN is that they are able to establish empirical relationships between independent and dependent variables, and extract subtle information and complex knowledge from representative data sets. The relationships between independent and dependent variables can be established without assumptions about any mathematical representation of the phenomena. ANN models provide certain advantages over regression-based models including its capacity to deal with noisy data. ANNs consist of a layer of input nodes and layer of output nodes, connected by one or more layers of hidden nodes.