Neural network models and deep learning - a primer for biologists

Understand

Originally inspired by neurobiology, deep neural network models have become a powerful tool of machine learning and artificial intelligence, where they are used to approximate functions and dynamics by learning from examples.

• Here we give a brief introduction to neural network models and deep learning for biologists.
• We introduce feedforward and recurrent networks and explain the expressive power of this modeling framework and the backpropagation algorithm for setting the parameters.
• Finally, we consider how deep neural networks might help us understand the brain's computations.