Perceptron
Learn about the most basic type of neural net, the single neuron perceptron! You will use it to divide linearly-separable data.
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Key Concepts
Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject
Introduction to Perceptrons
Perceptron Main Components
Perceptron Weighted Sum
Perceptron Activation Functions
Adjusting Perceptron Weights
Perceptron Training Error
Optimizing Perceptron Weights
Perceptron Bias Term
Introduction to Perceptrons
Introduction to Perceptrons
Perceptrons are the building blocks of neural networks. They are artificial models of biological neurons that simulate the task of decision-making. Perceptrons aim to solve binary classification problems given their input.
The basis of the idea of the perceptron is rooted in the words perception (the ability to sense something) and neurons (nerve cells in the human brain that turn sensory input into meaningful information).
- 1Similar to how atoms are the building blocks of matter and how microprocessors are the building blocks of a computer, perceptrons are the building blocks of Neural Networks . If you look closely,…
- 2So the perceptron is an artificial neuron that can make a simple decision. Let’s implement one from scratch in Python! The perceptron has three main components: * Inputs: Each input correspon…
- 3Great! Now that you understand the structure of the perceptron, here’s an important question — how are the inputs and weights magically turned into an output? This is a two-step process, and …
- 4After finding the weighted sum, the second step is to constrain the weighted sum to produce a desired output. Why is that important? Imagine if a perceptron had inputs in the range of 100-1000 …
- 5Our perceptron can now make a prediction given inputs, but how do we know if it gets those predictions right? Right now we expect the perceptron to be very bad because it has random weights. We h…
- 6Now that we have our training set, we can start feeding inputs into the perceptron and comparing the actual outputs against the expected labels! Every time the output mismatches the expected labe…
- 7What do we do once we have the errors for the perceptron? We slowly nudge the perceptron towards a better version of itself that eventually has zero error. The only way to do that is to change the…
- 8But one question still remains — how do we tweak the weights optimally? We can’t just play around randomly with the weights until the correct combination magically pops up. There needs to be …
- 9You have understood that the perceptron can be trained to produce correct outputs by tweaking the regular weights. However, there are times when a minor adjustment is needed for the perceptron to…
- 10So far so good! The perceptron works as expected, but everything seems to be taking place behind the scenes. What if we could visualize the perceptron’s training process to gain a better understand…
- 11Let’s recap what you just learned! The perceptron has inputs, weights, and an output. The weights are parameters that define the perceptron and they can be used to represent a line. In other words…
- 12Congratulations! You have now built your own perceptron from scratch. Let’s step back and think about what you just accomplished and see if there are any limits to a single perceptron. Earlier, …
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