Artificial Neural Networks and Its components

Data Science, AI and ML
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Neural Networks is a computational learning system that uses a network of functions to understand and translate a data input of one form into a desired output, usually in another form. The concept of the artificial neural network was inspired by human biology and the way neurons of the human brain function together to understand inputs from human senses.

In simple words, Neural Networks are a set of algorithms that tries to recognize the patterns, relationships, and information from the data through the process which is inspired by and works like the human brain/biology.

A simple neural network consists of three components :

  • Input layer
  • Hidden layer
  • Output layer

Input Layer: Also known as Input nodes are the inputs/information from the outside world is provided to the model to learn and derive conclusions from. Input nodes pass the information to the next layer i.e Hidden layer.

Hidden Layer: Hidden layer is the set of neurons where all the computations are performed on the input data. There can be any number of hidden layers in a neural network. The simplest network consists of a single hidden layer.

Output layer: The output layer is the output/conclusions of the model derived from all the computations performed. There can be single or multiple nodes in the output layer. If we have a binary classification problem the output node is 1 but in the case of multi-class classification, the output nodes can be more than 1.