Neural Network describes a class of algorithms. It's often misused in marketing (buzzword), but there is an engineering definition used by people that practice

Neural Network describes a class of algorithms. It's often misused in marketing (buzzword), but there is an engineering definition used by people that practice machine learning. A perceptron, the basic unit in a neural network, has one or more inputs, an algorithm for processing the input, and one or more outputs. Layers of perceptron are often used so that the original input gets transformed over each layer. The most common output for a neural network is a classification. The major variants of neural networks are ways a perceptron's algorithms change, the types of algorithms inside a perceptron, the number of layers and the number of inputs/outputs. Neural Networks are computationally heavy to train, but not computationally heavy to use once created. They are specifically good for working with image data. http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-10-neural-networks/ http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-10-neural-networks/