In this book, we have talked a lot about training, or teaching, machines to make predictions. To this end, we have employed a variety of useful and interesting algorithms including various types of regression, decisions trees, and nearest neighbors. However, let's take a step back and think about what entity we might want to mimic if we are trying to make accurate predictions and learn about data.
Well, the most obvious answer to this question is that we should mimic our own brains. We as humans have a natural ability to recognize objects, predict quantities, recognize frauds, and more, and these are all things that we would like machines to do artificially. Granted, we are not perfect at these activities, but we are pretty good!
This type of thinking was what lead to the development of artificial neural networks (also known as neural networks...
