What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Neural Networks?

Artificial Neural Networks

An artificial neural network (ANN) is an algorithmic framework that incorporates features from biological neural networks of the human brain in order to better understand how they are built and operated. Biological neural networks and ANNs function in very similar ways; however, they do not function in the same manner. The ANN algorithm only takes structured and numeric data. It is a mathematical representation of networked artificial neurons called nodes collaborating to process and transfer data. The artificial neuron or node is the fundamental unit of a synthetic neural network. Every node gets input signals and processes those signals to create an output signal. The input signal from the coupled neurons is then sent as the output signal.

Neurons are arranged in layers, with several nodes in each layer. There are three or more linked layers in an artificial neural network. Neurons in the input layer make up the first layer. These neurons transmit information to deeper layers, sharing the final output information with the final output layer. Each inner layer is concealed and comprises units that convert the data sent from one layer to the next in an adaptive manner. The capacity of each layer to function as both an input and an output layer allows the ANN to understand complicated objects quickly. Weights are used to visualise the connections between neurons. The weights assigned to each link determine the intensity and importance of the signal sent between neurons.

Advantages:

• Artificial neural networks (ANNs) offer an effective processing and information extraction framework for unstructured or disorganised data. ANNs can analyse various unstructured or unorganised data, making it possible to do tasks like picture identification, natural language interpretation, and audio processing. Extraction of pertinent features, which capture the fundamental trends and qualities of the unorganised data, is the first stage in data processing. ANNs may learn these properties automatically by using techniques such as convolutional layers in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for images.
• Artificial neural networks (ANNs) can learn and improve over time because of a crucial component called adaptive learning. It refers to ANNs' capacity to change their internal variable weights and biases in response to data collected during the training phase. ANNs may learn from examples, modify their representations, and enhance their performance over time by continually adjusting their internal variables depending on the training data. Adaptive learning enables ANNs to tackle complicated tasks, recognise patterns, and generalise to new, previously unknown data. It makes them practical tools for various applications in machine learning, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence.
• Utilising the advantages of parallel computing, ANNs may carry out several calculations at once. Parallel processing is critical for speeding up ANN training and prediction activities. Using numerous processing units allows ANNs to divide the workload, analyse data in parallel, and do calculations concurrently, resulting in shorter training durations and greater effectiveness. Another type of parallel processing used in ANNs is data parallelism, in which the training data is divided across several processing units. Data parallelism makes it possible for ANNs to analyse massive datasets more quickly by using several devices' combined computing capacity.
• Non-linear interactions between the inputs and the outputs can be modelled using ANNs. Unlike conventional linear models, ANNs can capture complex and non-linear patterns that expect a linear connection between variables. Due to their adaptability, they are suitable for various applications involving complicated interactions, including financial forecasting, natural language processing, and picture and audio recognition.
• ANNs have a variety of architectures, each of which is intended to address a particular class of issues. The availability of different designs gives ANNs versatility and adaptability, enabling them to tackle various jobs and domains. The most straightforward and popular ANN design is a feedforward neural network (FNN). Forward propagation is the method used by FNNs to transmit input data across the web and create an output. Images, videos, and other structured data can be processed in a grid-like fashion using CNNs. They make use of fully linked, pooling, and convolutional layers. GANs are employed in generative modelling, unsupervised learning, and the creation of accurate data samples. They may be used for anomaly detection, data enrichment, and picture synthesis. These are only a few illustrations of the several architectures accessible in ANNs.
• By combining fault tolerance and robustness approaches, ANNs can improve their dependability, adaptability, and capacity to perform effectively in real-world circumstances. ANNs have fault tolerance, allowing them to function and generate acceptable results even in noisy or imperfect data. Fault tolerance is related to an ANN's capacity to continue working generally in the midst of defects or mistakes. A fault-tolerant ANN should be capable of preventing errors from impairing performance or gracefully recovering from faults.
  In ANNs, robustness refers to the systems' capacity to continue operating consistently and accurately amid various uncertainties, disturbances, or hostile inputs. The network must be robust to run always under a variety of operational situations, to handle noisy or imperfect data adequately, and to withstand malicious assaults or other disruptions.
  For ANNs to be reliable and effective, fault tolerance and robustness are necessary. While robustness enables the network to function successfully under many situations and withstand assaults or disruptions, fault tolerance guarantees that the network can tolerate hardware or software problems.

Disadvantages:

• Training large-scale neural networks may be operationally expensive and time-consuming since they include millions of parameters. A neural network is trained by repeatedly iterating over epochs and adjusting the network's biases and weights to reduce error or loss. For each training example, forward and backward propagation must be performed, and gradient descent or variations must be used to update the network parameters. The training time grows exponentially as the network becomes more extensive or sophisticated. Training deep neural networks with several layers and millions of parameters might take days, weeks, or even months, especially when there are no high-performance hardware accelerators available, such as GPUs or TPUs.
• Lack of interpretability or transparency is one of the significant problems with ANNs. Although ANNs frequently provide precise predictions or classifications, they must clearly explain their results. Neural networks are regarded as "Black boxes" for this reason. This issue can be in essential fields like healthcare, economics, or the legal system, where justifications and explanations are necessary. It is challenging to trust and evaluate outcomes when lives or enormous resources are on the line since it is impossible to grasp the underlying logic that led a network to choose.
• For ANNs to properly learn and generalise, a lot of labelled training data is often needed. Compiling a sizable dataset with enough variety and representative samples can take a lot of time and effort. Such data collection and annotation can be expensive, particularly in specialised or specialised sectors where labelled data may be sparse or challenging. Large datasets require more memory and processing power, increasing training time and hardware needs. The accuracy and quality of the dataset have a direct influence on how well ANNs work. Skewed, biased, or wrongly labelled data can produce models that perform and generalise poorly.
• Artificial neural networks (ANNs) frequently need help with overfitting and generalisation. When a neural network performs very well on the training data but cannot generalise to unknown or fresh input, this is called overfitting. This problem occurs when the Structure needs to recognise the underlying fundamental patterns and instead learns the specific patterns and noise in the training set. A highly sophisticated model with many parameters can fit the training data exceptionally well, but it might not generalise to new samples. Generalisation describes a neural network's capacity to operate effectively on unknown input outside the training set. A network capable of making accurate predictions in practical situations has learned the underlying patterns and can generalise well. Poor generalisation, however, might lead to inaccurate or erroneous forecasts. To obtain acceptable generalisation performance, the complexity and volume of the given data must be balanced.
• Hyperparameters like learning rate, regularisation methods, and network architectural design must be carefully chosen and tuned for ANNs. Experimenting with different configurations of hyperparameters, network topologies, and model variants is necessary for both hyperparameter tweaking and architecture design. This procedure may take a lot of time and need expensive computing resources. Training and assessing several models with various hyperparameter values or designs can consume a substantial amount of computing resources, particularly for big datasets or complicated networks. Additional time and resources are needed since cross-validation and numerous training iterations are necessary.