High Level Introduction to Neural Networks

Spend any time in data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence circles and you are bound to come across a mention of Neural Networks. Ask what they are, and most people say, "it's like a brain, with lots of connected neurons". But what does that mean? This relation to a human brain has an element of truth, as at their heart, neural networks were inspired by attempts at modelling a neuron (and modelling the nervous system has been a big topic for many reasons). They were found to be good for performing binary classification problems, where an object can either be of one class or not (i.e. it is a "cat" or a "dog").