What is a Neural Network and its purpose?
Neural Network is one of the most familiar categories of Artificial Intelligence Systems that attempts to emulate the way the human brain works. Just like all the categories they all serve the same purpose of increasing the speed and consistency of decision making, solving problems with incomplete information, and resolving complicated issues that cannot be solve by conventional computers.
Common Application for Neural Networks
- Stock Market Predictions. Technical Analysts use neural networks to predict stock market prices based on past performance of other stocks and other factors. Citibank is one of those financial companies that use this system to gain advantage over other financial companies.
- Fraud Detection. Visa, MasterCard, and many other credit card companies use this system to to spot unfamiliar activities in individuals accounts. MasterCard saves an estimate of $50 million annually.
- Detection of Medical Phenomena. By monitoring variety of health-related indices many medical facilities use this system to recognize patterns to identify the right treatment for a medical condition.
- Fighting Crime. With crime reports as inputs, the system detects and maps local crime patterns which helps police predict crime trends, improve patrol assignment, and develop better crime detection
Features of Neural Networks
- Learning and adjusting new circumtances on their own.
- Lending themselves to massive parallel processing.
- Functioning without complete or well structured information.
- Coping with huge volumes of information with many dependent variables.
- Analyzing nonlinear relationships in information.
References
Baltzan, Phillips. Business Driven Information Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stneunet.html
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