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Artificial Neural Networks: A Tutorial Ani. Jain ‘Michigan State University Jianchang Mao | KM Mobiuddin {IBM Almaden Research Center | These massively parallel systems with large numbers | of interconnected simpl | processors may solve a variety | of challenging computational problems. This tutorial provides the background and the basics. | merous advances hve been nade in developing ineligent Db eeiis Mecat ser Resencherfrommary went dplines re desgnngat fia neural networks (ANN) ose aay o problemen pattern treognton,predtan, opinion esodae emery and conga (seth “Chlleging problems eb) Convnionalappescher ne ben pote fr svn pro ten ough sts epplaons cane foundin en weleon Srinedenvfonment, none fexble enough pero wel ouside {Soman ANN prvi ecing array, and eon aplctons couldbeneit omen them ‘This aice fr thos readers wkh itor no aod of ANN 0 hebpthemundestand nother aren thi sect Gamer Neds Costhemotatonetind the development ofa debe basic Pilot neron and th ara computational model cue net ‘orkarcietresandleaingprocese, and resetsome ofthe ost Common wed NN dele ccondde wcrc recgiion Stee AN apt. WHY ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS? “The long course of evolution has given the human brain many desie- able charaeteristies not present in von Neumann or modern parallel com puters. These include + massive parallelism, + isibuted representation and computation, + earning ability, + generalization ability, + adapsivity, + inherent contextual information procestng, + faultolerance, and * low energy consumption Itis hoped that devices based on biologieal neural nrworks will possess some of these desirable characteristics Modern digital computers outperform humans in the domain of numeric computation and related symbol manipulation. However, ‘humans can eforlessly solve complex perceptual problems (ike recog nizing a man in a crow from a mere glimpse of his face) at such a high speed and extent as to dwar the world’ fastest computer Why is there Sicha remarkable difference in their performance? The biological neural system architectures completely different from the von Neumann archi {eetute (See Table 1). This difference significantly affects the type of func- sions each computational model can best perform. ‘Numerou efforts to develop “intelligent” programs based on von [Neumann's centralized architecture have not resulted in general-purpose inteligene programs. Inspired by biological neural neworks, ANNs are massively parallel eomputing systems consisting ofan exremely large nu berofsimple processors with many interconnections. ANN modelsarempt ‘ose some “organizational” principles believed robe used in the human March i996 a Challenging probl Letus consider the folowing problems of intarest to com- puter scientists and engineers, Pattern classification ‘The task of pattern classification sto assign an inputpat- ‘tern like 3 speech waveform or handwritten symbol) rep- resented by a feature vector to one of many prespecified ‘lasses (See Figure A). Well-known applications include ‘character recognition, speech recagnition, EEG waveform

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