Neural Net - Getting down to the Basics
Let's start with something very basic - functions. Even though they are very fundamental mathematical entities, sometimes it really helps breaking things down to the smallest units to really understand the bigger concepts. Now a function is like a machine. You feed it some inputs and it produces some output(s). What happens inside the machine depends on how the function is defined. A very simple example is: y = f(x) = x^2 So an input of 2 will yield 4 when processed through this function. How would this function look like if we were to graph it? Take a look below: What you see is not a straight line, which makes this a non-linear function, that is, a function whose slope differs between two points. Now let's talk about composite functions. These are effectively taking the output of one function and passing that as input to another function. That would look something like this: Function 1: f(x)=x^2 Function 2: g(x)=2x Composite Function: f(g...
