ANNs are biologically inspired computational models that can be used to train a computer to perform a task using data. These models are part of the broad category of machine learning models. The distinction between these models and others is that these models are based on a collection of connected units called artificial neurons.
There are many types of ANNs and, in this book, we will use one specific type, which is called the multilayer perceptron (MLP). Please note that there are a lot more variations of ANNs. These are machine learning models and we can use them for classification and regression tasks, but we can actually extend these models and apply them to other very specific tasks such as computer vision, speech recognition, and machine translation. These models are the basis of the exciting and growing field of deep learning, which has been really...