Introduction

ANNs (Artificial Neural Network) is at the very core of Deep Learning an advanced version of Machine Learning techniques. ANNs are versatile, adaptive, and scalable, making them appropriate to tackle large datasets and highly complex Machine Learning tasks such as image classification (e.g., Google Images), speech recognition (e.g., Apple’s Siri), video recommendation (e.g., YouTube), or analyzing sentiments among customers (e.g. Twitter Sentiment Analyzer).

ANN was first introduced in 1943 by the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and the mathematician Walter Pitts. However, ANN had its ups and downs. Post-1960 there was a drop in interest and excitement among researchers w.r.t neural networks with the advancement of Support Vector Machines and other powerful Machine Learning techniques that produced better accuracy and had a stronger theoretical foundation. Neural networks were complex and required tremendous computation power and time to train. However post 1990, the advancement in the field of computation (refer to Moore’s law) followed by the production of powerful GPU cards brought some interest back.

#data-science #neural-networks #machine-learning #artificial-neural-network #artificial-intelligence