Neural network is a fairly broad term that covers a number of related methods but, in our case, we will focus on a feedforward network that trains with backpropagation. I'm not going to waste our time discussing how the machine learning methodology is similar or dissimilar to how a biological brain works. We only need to start with a working definition of what a neural network is.
To summarize, in machine learning and cognitive science, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a family of statistical learning models inspired by biological neural networks (the central ...