Neural networks are currently breaking records in tasks such as image and speech recognition, reading handwriting, understanding text, image segmentation, dialog systems, autonomous car driving, and so much more. While some of these aforementioned tasks will be covered in later chapters, it is important to introduce neural networks as an easy-to-implement machine learning algorithm, so that we can expand on it later.
The concept of a neural network has been around for decades. However, it only recently gained traction because we now have the computational power to train large networks because of advances in processing power, algorithm efficiency, and data sizes.
A neural network is basically a sequence of operations applied to a matrix of input data. These operations are usually collections of additions and multiplications followed by the application of non-linear...