Artificial neural networkArtificial neural networks (ANNs, also shortened to neural networks (NNs) or neural nets) are a branch of machine learning models that are built using principles of neuronal organization discovered by connectionism in the biological neural networks constituting animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a biological brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons.
Types of artificial neural networksThere are many types of artificial neural networks (ANN). Artificial neural networks are computational models inspired by biological neural networks, and are used to approximate functions that are generally unknown. Particularly, they are inspired by the behaviour of neurons and the electrical signals they convey between input (such as from the eyes or nerve endings in the hand), processing, and output from the brain (such as reacting to light, touch, or heat). The way neurons semantically communicate is an area of ongoing research.
Feedforward neural networkA feedforward neural network (FNN) is one of the two broad types of artificial neural network, characterized by direction of the flow of information between its layers. Its flow is uni-directional, meaning that the information in the model flows in only one direction—forward—from the input nodes, through the hidden nodes (if any) and to the output nodes, without any cycles or loops, in contrast to recurrent neural networks, which have a bi-directional flow.
Recurrent neural networkA recurrent neural network (RNN) is one of the two broad types of artificial neural network, characterized by direction of the flow of information between its layers. In contrast to uni-directional feedforward neural network, it is a bi-directional artificial neural network, meaning that it allows the output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. Their ability to use internal state (memory) to process arbitrary sequences of inputs makes them applicable to tasks such as unsegmented, connected handwriting recognition or speech recognition.
Deep learningDeep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning methods, which is based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. The adjective "deep" in deep learning refers to the use of multiple layers in the network. Methods used can be either supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
Two-port networkIn electronics, a two-port network (a kind of four-terminal network or quadripole) is an electrical network (i.e. a circuit) or device with two pairs of terminals to connect to external circuits. Two terminals constitute a port if the currents applied to them satisfy the essential requirement known as the port condition: the current entering one terminal must equal the current emerging from the other terminal on the same port. The ports constitute interfaces where the network connects to other networks, the points where signals are applied or outputs are taken.
Residual neural networkA Residual Neural Network (a.k.a. Residual Network, ResNet) is a deep learning model in which the weight layers learn residual functions with reference to the layer inputs. A Residual Network is a network with skip connections that perform identity mappings, merged with the layer outputs by addition. It behaves like a Highway Network whose gates are opened through strongly positive bias weights. This enables deep learning models with tens or hundreds of layers to train easily and approach better accuracy when going deeper.
Multiclass classificationIn machine learning and statistical classification, multiclass classification or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of three or more classes (classifying instances into one of two classes is called binary classification). While many classification algorithms (notably multinomial logistic regression) naturally permit the use of more than two classes, some are by nature binary algorithms; these can, however, be turned into multinomial classifiers by a variety of strategies.
Gradient descentIn mathematics, gradient descent (also often called steepest descent) is a iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. The idea is to take repeated steps in the opposite direction of the gradient (or approximate gradient) of the function at the current point, because this is the direction of steepest descent. Conversely, stepping in the direction of the gradient will lead to a local maximum of that function; the procedure is then known as gradient ascent.
Neural networkA neural network can refer to a neural circuit of biological neurons (sometimes also called a biological neural network), a network of artificial neurons or nodes in the case of an artificial neural network. Artificial neural networks are used for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems; they model connections of biological neurons as weights between nodes. A positive weight reflects an excitatory connection, while negative values mean inhibitory connections. All inputs are modified by a weight and summed.
Margin (machine learning)In machine learning the margin of a single data point is defined to be the distance from the data point to a decision boundary. Note that there are many distances and decision boundaries that may be appropriate for certain datasets and goals. A margin classifier is a classifier that explicitly utilizes the margin of each example while learning a classifier. There are theoretical justifications (based on the VC dimension) as to why maximizing the margin (under some suitable constraints) may be beneficial for machine learning and statistical inferences algorithms.
Multilayer perceptronA multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a misnomer for a modern feedforward artificial neural network, consisting of fully connected neurons with a nonlinear kind of activation function, organized in at least three layers, notable for being able to distinguish data that is not linearly separable. It is a misnomer because the original perceptron used a Heaviside step function, instead of a nonlinear kind of activation function (used by modern networks).
Highway networkIn machine learning, the Highway Network was the first working very deep feedforward neural network with hundreds of layers, much deeper than previous artificial neural networks. It uses skip connections modulated by learned gating mechanisms to regulate information flow, inspired by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. The advantage of a Highway Network over the common deep neural networks is that it solves or partially prevents the vanishing gradient problem, thus leading to easier to optimize neural networks.
Convolutional neural networkConvolutional neural network (CNN) is a regularized type of feed-forward neural network that learns feature engineering by itself via filters (or kernel) optimization. Vanishing gradients and exploding gradients, seen during backpropagation in earlier neural networks, are prevented by using regularized weights over fewer connections. For example, for each neuron in the fully-connected layer 10,000 weights would be required for processing an image sized 100 × 100 pixels.
Linear separabilityIn Euclidean geometry, linear separability is a property of two sets of points. This is most easily visualized in two dimensions (the Euclidean plane) by thinking of one set of points as being colored blue and the other set of points as being colored red. These two sets are linearly separable if there exists at least one line in the plane with all of the blue points on one side of the line and all the red points on the other side. This idea immediately generalizes to higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces if the line is replaced by a hyperplane.
Support vector machineIn machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Vladimir Vapnik with colleagues (Boser et al., 1992, Guyon et al., 1993, Cortes and Vapnik, 1995, Vapnik et al., 1997) SVMs are one of the most robust prediction methods, being based on statistical learning frameworks or VC theory proposed by Vapnik (1982, 1995) and Chervonenkis (1974).
Reinforcement learningReinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine learning paradigms, alongside supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Reinforcement learning differs from supervised learning in not needing labelled input/output pairs to be presented, and in not needing sub-optimal actions to be explicitly corrected.
BackpropagationAs a machine-learning algorithm, backpropagation performs a backward pass to adjust the model's parameters, aiming to minimize the mean squared error (MSE). In a single-layered network, backpropagation uses the following steps: Traverse through the network from the input to the output by computing the hidden layers' output and the output layer. (the feedforward step) In the output layer, calculate the derivative of the cost function with respect to the input and the hidden layers.
Softmax functionThe softmax function, also known as softargmax or normalized exponential function, converts a vector of K real numbers into a probability distribution of K possible outcomes. It is a generalization of the logistic function to multiple dimensions, and used in multinomial logistic regression. The softmax function is often used as the last activation function of a neural network to normalize the output of a network to a probability distribution over predicted output classes, based on Luce's choice axiom.
Active learning (machine learning)Active learning is a special case of machine learning in which a learning algorithm can interactively query a user (or some other information source) to label new data points with the desired outputs. In statistics literature, it is sometimes also called optimal experimental design. The information source is also called teacher or oracle. There are situations in which unlabeled data is abundant but manual labeling is expensive. In such a scenario, learning algorithms can actively query the user/teacher for labels.
