Data Analytics Made Accessible

by Anil Maheshwari

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is a sophisticated data mining technique from the Artificial Intelligence stream in Computer Science. It mimics the behavior of human neural structure: Neurons receive stimuli, process them, and communicate their results to other neurons successively, and eventually a neuron outputs a decision. A decision task may be processed by just one neuron and the result may be communicated soon. Alternatively, there could be many layers of neurons involved in a decision task, depending upon the complexity of the domain. The neural network can be trained by making a decision over and over again with many data points. It will continue to learn by adjusting its internal computation and communication parameters based on feedback received on its previous decisions. The intermediate values passed within the layers of neurons may not make any intuitive sense to an observer. Thus, the neural networks are considered a black-box system.