An artificial neural network (ANN)

An artificial neural network (ANN) in soft computing is a computational model inspired by the structure and function of
the human brain. It is a type of machine learning algorithm that can be used for a variety of tasks, such as classification,
regression, and clustering.

Key Components
1. Neurons: Neurons are the basic building blocks of an ANN. They are connected to each other through synapses and can
be arranged in layers.
2. Synapses: Synapses are the connections between neurons. They can be thought of as the "wires" that allow neurons to
communicate with each other.
3. Activation Functions: Activation functions are used to determine the output of a neuron based on the inputs it receives.
Common activation functions include sigmoid, tanh, and ReLU.
4. Layers: ANNs typically consist of multiple layers of neurons. Each layer processes the input data in a different way,
allowing the network to learn complex patterns and relationships.

How ANNs Work

1. Forward Propagation: The input data is propagated through the network, with each neuron applying its activation
function to the input it receives.
2. Backpropagation: The output of the network is compared to the desired output, and the error is propagated backwards
through the network. This process is used to adjust the weights and biases of the neurons to minimize the error.
3. Training: The network is trained by repeatedly presenting it with input data and adjusting the weights and biases based
on the error.

Applications
1. Image Recognition: ANNs can be used for image recognition tasks, such as identifying objects in images.
2. Speech Recognition: ANNs can be used for speech recognition tasks, such as recognizing spoken words.
3. Natural Language Processing: ANNs can be used for natural language processing tasks, such as language translation
and sentiment analysis.

Advantages
1. Flexibility: ANNs can be used for a wide range of tasks and can be easily modified to suit different applications.
2. Scalability: ANNs can be scaled up to handle large amounts of data and can be used for complex tasks.
3. Robustness: ANNs can be designed to be robust to noise and other forms of data corruption.

Challenges
1. Training: Training ANNs can be computationally intensive and requires large amounts of data.
2. Interpretability: ANNs can be difficult to interpret, making it challenging to understand how they arrive at their outputs.
3. Overfitting: ANNs can overfit the training data, resulting in poor performance on new, unseen data.

Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks contain artificial neurons which are called units. These units are arranged in
a series of layers that together constitute the whole Artificial Neural Network in a system. A layer can
have only a dozen units or millions of units as this depends on how the complex neural networks will be
required to learn the hidden patterns in the dataset. Commonly, Artificial Neural Network has an input
layer, an output layer as well as hidden layers. The input layer receives data from the outside world
which the neural network needs to analyze or learn about. Then this data passes through one or
multiple hidden layers that transform the input into data that is valuable for the output layer. Finally, the
output layer provides an output in the form of a response of the Artificial Neural Networks to input data
provided.
In the majority of neural networks, units are interconnected from one layer to another. Each of these
connections has weights that determine the influence of one unit on another unit. As the data transfers
from one unit to another, the neural network learns more and more about the data which eventually
results in an output from the output layer.

Neural Networks Architecture

The structures and operations of human neurons serve as the basis for artificial neural networks. It is
also known as neural networks or neural nets. The input layer of an artificial neural network is the first
layer, and it receives input from external sources and releases it to the hidden layer, which is the
second layer. In the hidden layer, each neuron receives input from the previous layer neurons,
computes the weighted sum, and sends it to the neurons in the next layer. These connections are
weighted means effects of the inputs from the previous layer are optimized more or less by assigning
different-different weights to each input and it is adjusted during the training process by optimizing these
weights for improved model performance.
Artificial neurons vs Biological neurons
The concept of artificial neural networks comes from biological neurons found in animal brains So they
share a lot of similarities in structure and function wise.
 Structure: The structure of artificial neural networks is inspired by biological neurons. A biological
neuron has a cell body or soma to process the impulses, dendrites to receive them, and an axon that
transfers them to other neurons. The input nodes of artificial neural networks receive input signals,
the hidden layer nodes compute these input signals, and the output layer nodes compute the final
output by processing the hidden layer’s results using activation functions.
Artificial
Biological Neuron Neuron

Dendrite Inputs

Cell nucleus or
Nodes
Soma

Synapses Weights

Axon Output

 Synapses: Synapses are the links between biological neurons that enable the transmission of
impulses from dendrites to the cell body. Synapses are the weights that join the one-layer nodes to
the next-layer nodes in artificial neurons. The strength of the links is determined by the weight value.
 Learning: In biological neurons, learning happens in the cell body nucleus or soma, which has a
nucleus that helps to process the impulses. An action potential is produced and travels through the
axons if the impulses are powerful enough to reach the threshold. This becomes possible by synaptic
plasticity, which represents the ability of synapses to become stronger or weaker over time in
reaction to changes in their activity. In artificial neural networks, backpropagation is a technique used
for learning, which adjusts the weights between nodes according to the error or differences between
predicted and actual outcomes.
Biological Neuron Artificial Neuron

Synaptic plasticity Backpropagations

 Activation: In biological neurons, activation is the firing rate of the neuron which happens when the
impulses are strong enough to reach the threshold. In artificial neural networks, A mathematical
function known as an activation function maps the input to the output, and executes activations.

Biological neurons to Artificial neurons

How do Artificial Neural Networks learn?

Artificial neural networks are trained using a training set. For example, suppose you want to teach an
ANN to recognize a cat. Then it is shown thousands of different images of cats so that the network can
learn to identify a cat. Once the neural network has been trained enough using images of cats, then you
need to check if it can identify cat images correctly. This is done by making the ANN classify the images
it is provided by deciding whether they are cat images or not. The output obtained by the ANN is
corroborated by a human-provided description of whether the image is a cat image or not. If the ANN
identifies incorrectly then back-propagation is used to adjust whatever it has learned during
training. Backpropagation is done by fine-tuning the weights of the connections in ANN units based on
the error rate obtained. This process continues until the artificial neural network can correctly recognize
a cat in an image with minimal possible error rates.

What are the types of Artificial Neural Networks?

 Feedforward Neural Network : The feedforward neural network is one of the most basic artificial
neural networks. In this ANN, the data or the input provided travels in a single direction. It enters into
the ANN through the input layer and exits through the output layer while hidden layers may or may
not exist. So the feedforward neural network has a front-propagated wave only and usually does not
have backpropagation.
 Convolutional Neural Network : A Convolutional neural network has some similarities to the feed-
forward neural network, where the connections between units have weights that determine the
 influence of one unit on another unit. But a CNN has one or more than one convolutional layer that
uses a convolution operation on the input and then passes the result obtained in the form of output to
the next layer. CNN has applications in speech and image processing which is particularly useful in
computer vision.

 Modular Neural Network: A Modular Neural Network contains a collection of different neural
networks that work independently towards obtaining the output with no interaction between them.
Each of the different neural networks performs a different sub-task by obtaining unique inputs
compared to other networks. The advantage of this modular neural network is that it breaks down a
large and complex computational process into smaller components, thus decreasing its complexity
while still obtaining the required output.

 Radial basis function Neural Network: Radial basis functions are those functions that consider the
distance of a point concerning the center. RBF functions have two layers. In the first layer, the input
is mapped into all the Radial basis functions in the hidden layer and then the output layer computes
the output in the next step. Radial basis function nets are normally used to model the data that
represents any underlying trend or function.

 Recurrent Neural Network: The Recurrent Neural Network saves the output of a layer and feeds
this output back to the input to better predict the outcome of the layer. The first layer in the RNN is
quite similar to the feed-forward neural network and the recurrent neural network starts once the
output of the first layer is computed. After this layer, each unit will remember some information from
the previous step so that it can act as a memory cell in performing computations.

Applications of Artificial Neural Networks

1. Social Media: Artificial Neural Networks are used heavily in Social Media. For example, let’s take
the ‘People you may know’ feature on Facebook that suggests people that you might know in real
life so that you can send them friend requests. Well, this magical effect is achieved by using Artificial
Neural Networks that analyze your profile, your interests, your current friends, and also their friends
and various other factors to calculate the people you might potentially know. Another common
application of Machine Learning in social media is facial recognition. This is done by finding around
100 reference points on the person’s face and then matching them with those already available in
the database using convolutional neural networks.

2. Marketing and Sales: When you log onto E-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart, they will
recommend your products to buy based on your previous browsing history. Similarly, suppose you
love Pasta, then Zomato, Swiggy, etc. will show you restaurant recommendations based on your
tastes and previous order history. This is true across all new-age marketing segments like Book
sites, Movie services, Hospitality sites, etc. and it is done by implementing personalized marketing.
This uses Artificial Neural Networks to identify the customer likes, dislikes, previous shopping history,
etc., and then tailor the marketing campaigns accordingly.

3. Healthcare: Artificial Neural Networks are used in Oncology to train algorithms that can identify
cancerous tissue at the microscopic level at the same accuracy as trained physicians. Various rare
diseases may manifest in physical characteristics and can be identified in their premature stages by
using Facial Analysis on the patient photos. So the full-scale implementation of Artificial Neural
Networks in the healthcare environment can only enhance the diagnostic abilities of medical experts
and ultimately lead to the overall improvement in the quality of medical care all over the world.

4. Personal Assistants: I am sure you all have heard of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, etc., and also heard them
based on the phones you have!!! These are personal assistants and an example of speech
recognition that uses Natural Language Processing to interact with the users and formulate a
response accordingly. Natural Language Processing uses artificial neural networks that are made to
handle many tasks of these personal assistants such as managing the language syntax, semantics,
correct speech, the conversation that is going on, etc.
classification of artificial neural network
 Classification of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs):-

in Soft Computing involves categorizing ANNs based on their learning methods and applications. Here are the main
categories:

1. Supervised Learning

 Classification ANNs: These ANNs are trained on labeled data to predict a specific class or category.
They are used for tasks like image classification, speech recognition, and text classification.

2. Unsupervised Learning

 Clustering ANNs: These ANNs group similar data points into clusters without any prior knowledge of
the classes. They are used for tasks like customer segmentation, image segmentation, and anomaly
detection.

3. Reinforcement Learning

 Recurrent ANNs: These ANNs learn by interacting with an environment and receiving rewards or
penalties. They are used for tasks like game playing, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.

4. Hybrid Learning

 Combination of Supervised and Unsupervised Learning: These ANNs use both labeled and
unlabeled data to learn patterns and relationships. They are used for tasks like image recognition and
natural language processing.

5. Specialized ANNs

 Convolutional ANNs: These ANNs are designed for image and video processing tasks, such as object detection and
image classification.
 Recurrent ANNs: These ANNs are designed for tasks that involve sequential data, such as speech recognition, language
translation, and time series forecasting

Benefits of Artificial Neural Networks

ANNs offers many key benefits that make them particularly well-suited to specific issues and situations:

 ANNs can learn and model non-linear and complicated interactions, which is critical since many of the

relationships between inputs and outputs in real life are non-linear and complex.

 Artificial Neural Networks can generalize – After learning from the original inputs and their associations, the

model may infer unknown relationships from anonymous data, allowing it to generalize and predict unknown

data.

 ANN does not impose any constraints on the input variables, unlike many other prediction approaches (like how

they should be distributed). Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that ANNs can better simulate

heteroskedasticity, or data with high volatility and non-constant variance, because of their capacity to discover
 latent correlations in the data without imposing any preset associations. This is particularly helpful in financial

time series forecasting (for example, stock prices) when significant data volatility.

Types of Artificial Neural Networks

Five Types of Artifical Neural Networks:

 Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs): These are straightforward networks where information flows in one

direction, like from the input to the output. They’re used for tasks like identifying patterns in data or making

predictions, making them ideal for pattern recognition.

 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): Think of these as networks designed specifically for understanding

images. They’re great at recognizing patterns in pictures, making them perfect for tasks like identifying objects

in photos or videos.

 Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): These networks are good with sequences, like predicting the next word in a

sentence or understanding the context of words. They remember previous information, which helps them

understand the current data better.

 Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs): LSTMs are a type of RNN that are really good at remembering

long sequences of data. They’re often used in tasks where understanding context over time is important, like

translating languages or analyzing time-series data.

 Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): These networks are like artists. One part of the network generates

new data, like images or music, while the other part critiques it to make sure it looks or sounds realistic. GANs

are a key technology in generative AI. GANs are used for creating new content, enhancing images, or even

generating deepfakes.

How do Artificial Neural Networks Learn?

Here is the Steps to learn ai neural Network:

1. Starting Point: Imagine you’re building a robot brain, but initially, it knows nothing. So, you randomly assign

some strengths to the connections between its “neurons” (like how our brain’s neurons are connected).

2. Seeing Data: Now, show the robot some examples of what you want it to learn. For instance, if you’re teaching

it to recognize cats, show it lots of pictures of cats.

3. Guessing and Checking: The robot tries to imagine what it’s seeing based on the strengths of its connections. At

first, it’ll make lots of mistakes because it’s just guessing randomly.
 4. Getting Feedback: You tell the robot how wrong its guesses are. For example, you say, “No, that’s not a cat; it’s

a dog.” This helps the robot understand where it went wrong and adjust through feedback loops.

5. Adjusting Strengths: The robot tweaks the strengths of its connections based on the feedback. If it guessed

wrong, it changes the connections to be a bit stronger or weaker so that next time it might make a better guess.

This learning process helps the robot improve its accuracy over time.

6. Practice Makes Perfect: The robot keeps looking at more examples, guessing, getting feedback, and adjusting

until it gets better and better at recognizing cats.

7. Testing Skills: Once the robot has seen lots of examples and adjusted its connections a lot, you give it a new

picture it hasn’t seen before to see if it can correctly identify whether it’s a cat or not.

Application of Artificial Neural Networks

ANNs have a wide range of applications because of their unique properties. A few of the important applications
of ANNs include:

1. Image Processing and Character recognition:

ANNs play a significant part in picture and character recognition because of their capacity to take in many
inputs, process them, and infer hidden and complicated, non-linear correlations. Character recognition, such as
handwriting recognition, has many applications in fraud detection (for example, bank fraud) and even national
security assessments.

Image recognition is a rapidly evolving discipline with several applications ranging from social media facial
recognition to cancer detection in medicine to satellite image processing for agricultural and defense purposes.

Deep neural networks, which form the core of “deep learning,” have now opened up all of the new and
transformative advances in computer science, speech recognition, and natural language processing – notable
examples being self-driving vehicles, and other applications powered by neural nets.
2. Forecasting:

It is widely used in everyday company decisions (sales, the financial allocation between goods, and capacity
utilization), economic and monetary policy, finance, and the stock market. Forecasting issues are frequently
complex; for example, predicting stock prices is complicated with many underlying variables (some known,
some unseen).

Traditional forecasting models have flaws when it comes to accounting for these complicated, non-linear
interactions. Given its capacity to model and extract previously unknown characteristics and correlations,
ANNs can provide a reliable alternative when used correctly even in unsupervised learning scenarios. ANN
also has no restrictions on the input and residual distributions, unlike conventional models.So, this ai neural
network applications.

Advantages of Artificial Neural Networks

 Attribute-value pairs are used to represent problems in ANN.

 The output of ANNs can be discrete-valued, real-valued, or a vector of multiple real or discrete-valued

characteristics, while the target function can be discrete-valued, real-valued, or a vector of numerous real or

discrete-valued attributes.

 Noise in the training data is not a problem for ANN learning techniques. There may be mistakes in the training

samples, but they will not affect the final result.

 It’s utilized when a quick assessment of the taught target function is necessary.

 The number of weights in the network, the number of training instances evaluated, and the settings of different

learning algorithm parameters can all contribute to extended training periods for ANNs.

Disadvantages of Artificial Neural Networks

 1. Hardware Dependence:

 The construction of Artificial Neural Networks necessitates the use of parallel processors.

 As a result, the equipment’s realization is contingent.

2. Understanding the network’s operation:

 This is the most serious issue with ANN.

 When ANN provides a probing answer, it does not explain why or how it was chosen.

 As a result, the network’s confidence is eroded.

3. Assured network structure:

 Any precise rule does not determine the structure of artificial neural networks.

 Experience and trial and error are used to develop a suitable network structure.

4. Difficulty in presenting the issue to the network:

 ANNs are capable of working with numerical data.

 Before being introduced to ANN, problems must be converted into numerical values.

 The display method that is chosen will have a direct impact on the network’s performance.

 The user’s skill is a factor here.

5. The network’s lifetime is unknown:

 When the network’s error on the sample is decreased to a specific amount, the training is complete.

 The value does not produce the best outcomes.

Activation functions in neural networks:-

are used to introduce non-linearity into the output of a neuron. They determine whether a neuron should be activated or
not by calculating the weighted sum and further adding bias to it. Here are some key points about activation functions:

1. Types of Activation Functions

 Linear Activation Function: This function does not introduce non-linearity and is equivalent to a
linear regression model. It is not commonly used in neural networks.
 Non-Linear Activation Functions:
 Sigmoid or Logistic Activation Function: This function maps the output to a value between 0 and 1.
It is often used for binary classification and is differentiable.
 Tanh or Hyperbolic Tangent Activation Function: This function maps the output to a value
between -1 and 1. It is also differentiable and is often used for binary classification.
 ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit) Activation Function: This function maps all negative values to 0 and
all positive values to the same value. It is not differentiable at 0 but is widely used in neural networks
due to its simplicity and efficiency.
 Leaky ReLU: This function is similar to ReLU but allows a small fraction of the input to pass through
even if it is negative. It is used to address the "dying ReLU" problem where many neurons become
inactive during training.

2. Why Non-Linear Activation Functions are Necessary

 Non-Linear Transformation: Non-linear activation functions are necessary to introduce non-linearity

into the output of a neuron. This allows the neural network to learn and perform more complex tasks.
 Prevents Linear Behavior: Without non-linear activation functions, a neural network would behave
like a linear regression model, which is not capable of learning complex patterns.

3. Properties of Activation Functions

 Differentiability: Differentiable activation functions are preferred because they enable gradient-
based optimization methods. ReLU is not differentiable at 0, which can cause issues during training.
 Range: The range of the activation function can affect the stability of gradient-based training
methods. Finite ranges can lead to more stable training, while infinite ranges can lead to more
efficient training.

4. Common Applications

 Binary Classification: Sigmoid and Tanh are commonly used for binary classification tasks.
 Convolutional Neural Networks: ReLU is widely used in convolutional neural networks due to its
simplicity and efficiency.
 Multiclass Classification: Softmax is often used for multiclass classification tasks.

5. Comparison of Activation Functions

 Empirical Performance: Different activation functions have different empirical performance on

various tasks. For example, ReLU is widely used due to its simplicity and efficiency, while Sigmoid and
Tanh are used for specific tasks like binary classification.

applications of ANNs
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a crucial component of soft computing, which involves the use of artificial
intelligence and machine learning techniques to solve complex problems. Here are some key applications of ANNs in soft
computing:

1. Image Recognition and Computer Vision

 Facial Recognition: ANNs are used to identify and verify human faces in images and videos. This technology is
used in surveillance, security, and law enforcement.

2. Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing

 Speech Recognition: ANNs are used to transcribe spoken words into text. This technology is used in virtual
assistants, customer service chatbots, and other applications that require understanding and responding to
human speech.
 3. Financial Forecasting and Trading

 Stock Market Prediction: ANNs are used to analyze financial data and make predictions about market trends
and stock prices. This technology is used by financial institutions to improve investment strategies and
minimize risk.

4. Medical Diagnosis and Treatment Planning

 Medical Diagnosis: ANNs are used to analyze medical images and patient data to identify diseases and
disorders. This technology is used to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of medical diagnoses and
treatments.

5. Autonomous Vehicles

 Autonomous Vehicles: ANNs are used to analyze sensor data and make decisions about how the vehicle
should respond to its environment. This technology is used to develop self-driving cars, drones, and other
autonomous vehicles.

6. Recommender Systems

 Recommender Systems: ANNs are used to analyze user behavior and make recommendations about
products, services, and content that are likely to be of interest to the user. This technology is used by e-
commerce websites, streaming services, and other online platforms to improve the user experience and
increase engagement.

7. Natural Language Generation

 Natural Language Generation: ANNs are used to generate text that mimics human writing. This technology is
used in news articles, reports, and other forms of content that require natural and engaging writing .

8. Fraud Detection

 Fraud Detection: ANNs are used to analyze financial transactions and identify patterns that indicate
fraudulent activity. This technology is used by banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions to
improve security measures and reduce the risk of fraud.

9. Supply Chain Optimization

 Supply Chain Optimization: ANNs are used to analyze data from various stages of the supply chain to
identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. This technology is used to streamline supply chains, reduce waste, and
improve overall performance.

10. Predictive Maintenance

 Predictive Maintenance: ANNs are used to analyze data from equipment sensors to identify patterns and
anomalies that indicate when equipment is likely to fail. This technology is used to reduce maintenance costs,
improve equipment reliability, and minimize downtime

Training an Artificial Neural Network (ANN):-

in soft computing involves several techniques and considerations. Here are the key points:

1. Learning Techniques
 Supervised Learning: In this method, the network is trained using labeled data where the output is
known. The goal is to minimize the error between the network's output and the target output.
Common algorithms include gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent, and backpropagation.

2. Unsupervised Learning

 Unsupervised Learning: In this method, the network is trained using unlabeled data. The goal is to
identify patterns and relationships in the data. Common algorithms include clustering, self-organizing
maps, and competitive learning.

3. Reinforcement Learning

 Reinforcement Learning: In this method, the network is trained using rewards or penalties. The goal
is to learn a policy that maximizes the rewards. Common algorithms include Q-learning and policy
gradient methods.

4. Error Correction

 Error Correction: In this method, the network is trained using error correction techniques such as
least mean squares and Hebbian learning.

5. Activation Functions

 Activation Functions: These are used to introduce non-linearity in the network. Common activation
functions include sigmoid, tanh, ReLU, and softmax.

6. Optimization Techniques

 Optimization Techniques: These are used to optimize the network's performance. Common
techniques include gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent, and genetic algorithms.

7. Training Algorithms

 Training Algorithms: These are used to train the network. Common algorithms include
backpropagation, Adaline, and Hopfield networks.

8. Applications

 Applications: ANNs are used in various applications such as image recognition, speech recognition,
natural language processing, and predictive maintenance.

9. Advantages

 Advantages: ANNs have several advantages such as fault tolerance, adaptability, and ability to learn
from data.

10. Disadvantages

 Disadvantages: ANNs have several disadvantages such as lack of transparency, difficulty in

determining the network structure, and potential for overfitting.
 11. Types of ANNs

 Types of ANNs: There are several types of ANNs such as feedforward neural networks, convolutional
neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and modular neural networks.

12. Soft Computing

 Soft Computing: ANNs are a key component of soft computing, which involves the use of artificial
intelligence and machine learning techniques to solve complex problems.

13. Training a Neural Network

 Training a Neural Network: Training a neural network involves several steps such as data
preprocessing, model selection, training, and testing. The goal is to minimize the error between the
network's output and the target output.

14. Training Techniques

 Training Techniques: There are several training techniques such as gradient descent, stochastic
gradient descent, and backpropagation. The choice of technique depends on the specific problem
and the type of ANN.

15. Training Data

 Training Data: The quality and quantity of training data are crucial for the performance of the
network. The data should be representative of the problem and should be sufficient to train the
network.

16. Training Time

 Training Time: The training time of a neural network depends on several factors such as the size of
the network, the complexity of the problem, and the choice of training technique. The goal is to
minimize the training time while maintaining the performance of the network.

17. Training Error

 Training Error: The training error is the difference between the network's output and the target
output. The goal is to minimize the training error while maintaining the performance of the network.

18. Training Metrics

 Training Metrics: There are several training metrics such as mean squared error, mean absolute
error, and cross-entropy. The choice of metric depends on the specific problem and the type of ANN.

19. Training Hyperparameters

 Training Hyperparameters: There are several training hyperparameters such as learning rate, batch
size, and number of hidden layers. The choice of hyperparameters depends on the specific problem
and the type of ANN.

20. Training a Neural Network in Soft Computing

 Training a Neural Network in Soft Computing: Training a neural network in soft computing
involves several techniques and considerations. The goal is to minimize the error between the
network's output and the target output while maintaining the performance of the network.