Sure. In 100% of articles you've seen in the last few years re: "Deep learning", it's about neural networks. It's not that neural nets are magic, it's just that

Sure. In 100% of articles you've seen in the last few years re: "Deep learning", it's about neural networks. It's not that neural nets are magic, it's just that stacking them has been called "deep learning" and that's the name that seems to be sticking. I'll even be cynical and say neural nets got such a bad rep by the 90s that they needed a new name. Re: stacking SVMs and decision trees for feature hierarchies: I guess you could (maybe), but you'd get worse results than if you used neural nets. And definitionally it wouldn't be deep learning.