How does a usual fully-connected feed-forward neural network work? ‍

Neural nets are good at solving non-linear problems. Some good examples are problems that are relatively easy for humans (because of experience, intuition, understanding, etc), but difficult for traditional regression models: speech recognition, handwriting recognition, image identification, etc.

In a usual fully-connected feed-forward network, each neuron receives input from every element of the previous layer and thus the receptive field of a neuron is the entire previous layer. They are usually used to represent feature vectors for input data in classification problems but can be expensive to train because of the number of computations involved.

Activation Functions

The main idea of using neural networks is to learn complex nonlinear functions. If we are not using an activation function in between different layers of a neural network, we are just stacking up multiple linear layers one on top of another and this leads to learning a linear function. The Nonlinearity comes only with the activation function, this is the reason we need activation functions.

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