Deep Learning: Practical Neural Networks with Java

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Neural Networks

In this chapter, we will introduce neural networks and what they are designed for. This chapter serves as a foundation layer for the subsequent chapters, while presenting the basic concepts for neural networks. In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Artificial neurons
• Weights and biases
• Activation functions
• Layers of neurons
• Neural network implementation in Java

Discovering neural networks

By hearing the term neural networks we intuitively create a snapshot of a brain in our minds, and indeed that's right, if we consider the brain to be a big and natural neural network. However, what about artificial neural networks (ANNs)? Well, here comes an opposite word to natural, and the first thing now that ...