Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a type of artificial neural network designed to work with

sequence data, where the order of elements matters. They are particularly well-suited for tasks such as
time series prediction, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and handwriting
recognition.

Here's an explanation of how RNNs work:

1. **Sequential Data Handling**: RNNs process input sequences one element at a time, while
maintaining an internal state or memory. This memory enables them to capture information about
previous elements in the sequence and use it to inform the processing of subsequent elements.

2. **Recurrent Connections**: The key feature of RNNs is the presence of recurrent connections
within the network. These connections allow information to persist over time by feeding the output of
a neuron back into the network as input for the next timestep.

3. **Time Unfolding**: Conceptually, an RNN can be thought of as a chain of neural network units,
each corresponding to a timestep in the input sequence. When processing a sequence of length T, the
RNN effectively "unrolls" into T copies of the same network, with each copy sharing the same
parameters.

4. **Hidden State**: At each timestep, an RNN maintains a hidden state vector, which serves as its
memory of the past. This hidden state is updated based on the current input and the previous hidden
state, using a set of learned parameters (weights and biases). Mathematically, the hidden state \( h_t \)
at timestep t is computed as a function of the input \( x_t \) and the previous hidden state \( h_{t-1} \),
typically using a non-linear activation function like the hyperbolic tangent (tanh) or the rectified linear
unit (ReLU).

\[ h_t = f(W_{ih}x_t + W_{hh}h_{t-1} + b_h) \]

where:
- \( W_{ih} \) and \( W_{hh} \) are the weight matrices for the input-to-hidden and hidden-to-hidden
connections, respectively.
- \( b_h \) is the bias vector.
- \( f \) is the activation function.

5. **Output Generation**: The output of an RNN can be produced at each timestep or only at the
final timestep, depending on the task. For sequence prediction tasks, the output at each timestep may
be used to predict the next element in the sequence. Alternatively, for sequence classification tasks,
the final hidden state may be passed through a fully connected layer to produce a final output.
6. **Training**: RNNs are typically trained using the backpropagation through time (BPTT)
algorithm, which is a variation of backpropagation specifically designed for sequences. BPTT unfolds
the network over time, computes gradients for each timestep, and then aggregates these gradients to
update the network parameters.

Despite their effectiveness, traditional RNNs suffer from the problem of vanishing or exploding
gradients, which can make training difficult for long sequences. This limitation has led to the
development of more advanced RNN variants, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks
and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), which address these issues while retaining the sequential
processing capabilities of RNNs.