Scala: Guide for Data Science Professionals

Benefits and limitations

The advantages and disadvantages of neural networks depend on which other machine learning methods they are compared to. However, neural-network-based classifiers, particularly the multilayer perceptron using error backpropagation, have some obvious advantages, such as:

• The mathematical foundation of a neural network does not require expertise in dynamic programming or linear algebra, beyond the basic gradient descent algorithm.
• A neural network can perform tasks that a linear algorithm cannot.
• MLP is usually reliable for highly dynamic and nonlinear processes. Contrary to the support vector machines, they do not require us to increase the problem dimension through kernelization.
• MLP does not make any assumption on linearity, ...