The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Columbia Encyclopedia World Factbook American Heritage Coll. Neural networks imitate the brain's ability to sort out patterns and learn from trial and error, discerning and extracting the relationships that underlie the data with which it is presented.
Most neural networks are software simulations run on conventional computers.
The neuron mathematically manipulates the inputs, and outputs the result. The neural network is simply neurons joined together, with the output from one neuron becoming input to others until the final output is reached. 1 Neural networks are good at providing very fast, very close approximations of the correct answer. Although they are not as well suited as conventional computers for performing mathematical calculations or moving and comparing alphabetic characters, neural networks excel at recognizing shapes or patterns, learning from experience, or sorting relevant data from irrelevant. Their applications can be categorized into classification, recognition and identification, assessment, monitoring and control, and forecasting and prediction.