Conduct research in the University of the People Library and the internet on the functioning

of an artificial neuron and the concept of the activation function. Report your findings and
include a description of the activation function and why the sigsmoid function is important in
artificial neurons and how this relates to a biological neuron.

Activation function
Activation functions are the mathematical equation that decides the output of the deep learning
model, accuracy of the neural network, and the computational efficiency of training a model
(Sharma, 2017). It has a big effect on the neural network’s ability to converge and the convergence
speed. In the activation function, the function is attached to each neuron in the network and
determines whether to be activated or not, thus based on how relevant each neuron’s input is for the
model’s prediction. It normalizes the output of each neuron to a range of 1 and 0 or between -1 and
1.
Here are some advantages of Activation function:
• Activation function is a very important part of the process that the artificial neurons perform
in the current neural networks.
• It has mathematical equations that are used to specify the performance of a neural network.
• They transform the input signal of a node in such an ANN to an output signal.
• Its output signal is used as an input in the next layer in the stack, in which it is defined as
Transfer Function.
Artificial neuron
An artificial neuron is a connection point in the artificial neural networks. It works like the human
body, in which each network node can manage the input and forward the output to the network.
Like a human brain, it has a layered architecture that has connection points that process the
information from the input and forwarded it to the other available nodes in the network
(Gershenson, n.d.). The component called the neuron can be used to simplify decisions and provide
precise solutions to some complex problems like processing natural languages.
Here are some advantages of Artificial neurons:
• The neuron is a contact point in an ANN (Artificial neural networks), which like in the
human body's neural network, it has a layer, and each network node has the capacity that is
used to manage the input and forward the output to the network.
• It represents a digital structure that replicates the actions of a biological neuron in the brain
of a human.
• The artificial neuron is used to create an ANN as it has a set of weighted inputs that includes
a transformation function and an activation function.
Why is the sigmoid function important in artificial neurons?
Sigmoid functions are used in artificial neural networks to introduce non-linearity in the model
(Gershenson, n.d.). They are actually a form of activation function which helps the artificial neural
network to learn new patterns. So, if it makes a mistake/s, then, it learns from those mistakes and
keeps those patterns in its memory as a learned state. The activation functions in the artificial neural
networks like the sigmoid function help to map the inputs and responses so that the learning

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 association can be between the actual input and results. The bottom line is that the sigmoid function
satisfies a property between the derivative and itself and it is computationally easy to perform it.
Here are some added importance of sigmoid function:
• The sigmoid function has been used in neural networks to offer logistic neurons real-valued
output that can be a bounded the function of their total input.
• It has an added advantage, where it gets good derivatives that make the learning of NN
weights simpler.
• Human uses sigmoid function as it takes place between 0 to 1. Therefore, it is used during
models since humans need to compute the likelihood as an output (Sharma, 2017).

References
Gershenson, C. (n.d.). Artificial Neural Networks for Beginners. Arxiv.org:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0308/0308031.pdf
Sharma, S. (2017, September 6). Activation Functions in Neural Networks.
Towardsdatascience.com: https://towardsdatascience.com/activation-functions-neural-networks-
1cbd9f8d91d6

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