Artificial neuron

An artificial neuron is a mathematical function conceived as a model of biological neurons, a neural network. Artificial neurons are elementary units in an artificial neural network. The artificial neuron receives one or more inputs (representing excitatory postsynaptic potentials and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials at neural dendrites) and sums them to produce an output (or , representing a neuron's action potential which is transmitted along its axon). Usually each input is separately weighted, and the sum is passed through a non-linear function known as an activation function or transfer function. The transfer functions usually have a sigmoid shape, but they may also take the form of other non-linear functions, piecewise linear functions, or step functions. They are also often monotonically increasing, continuous, differentiable and bounded. Non-monotonic, unbounded and oscillating activation functions with multiple zeros that outperform sigmoidal and ReLU like activation functions on many tasks have also been recently explored. The thresholding function has inspired building logic gates referred to as threshold logic; applicable to building logic circuits resembling brain processing. For example, new devices such as memristors have been extensively used to develop such logic in recent times. The artificial neuron transfer function should not be confused with a linear system's transfer function. Artificial neurons can also refer to artificial cells in neuromorphic engineering that are similar to natural physical neurons. For a given artificial neuron k, let there be m + 1 inputs with signals x0 through xm and weights wk0 through wkm. Usually, the x0 input is assigned the value +1, which makes it a bias input with wk0 = bk. This leaves only m actual inputs to the neuron: from x1 to xm. The output of the kth neuron is: Where (phi) is the transfer function (commonly a threshold function). The output is analogous to the axon of a biological neuron, and its value propagates to the input of the next layer, through a synapse.