A Quick Introduction to Neural Networks

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a computational model that is inspired by the way biological neural networks in the human brain process information. Artificial Neural Networks have generated a lot of excitement in Machine Learning research and industry, thanks to many breakthrough results in speech recognition, computer vision and text processing. In this post, we will try to develop an understanding of a particular type of Artificial Neural Network called the Multi-Layer Perceptron. ANNs are at the core of Deep Learning. They are versatile, powerful, and scalable, making them ideal to tackle large and highly complex Machine Learning tasks, such as classifying billions of images (e.g., Google Images), powering speech recognition services (e.g., Apple's Siri), recommending the best videos to watch to hundreds of millions of users every day (e.g., Youtube), or learning to beat the world champion at the game of Go by examining millions of past games and then playing against itself (DeepMind's AlphaGo).