Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are based on the early work of Rumelhart (Rumelhart, D. E., et al. (1986)), who was a psychologist who worked closely with Hinton, whom we have already mentioned here several times. The concept is simple, but revolutionary in the area of pattern recognition that uses sequences of data.
The concept of recurrence in RNNs can be illustrated as shown in the following diagram. If you think of a dense layer of neural units, these can be stimulated using some input at different time steps, . Figures 13.1 (b) and (c) show an RNN with five time steps, . We can see in Figures 13.1 (b) and (c) how the input is accessible to the different time steps, but more importantly, the output of the neural units is also available to the next layer of neurons: