Getting started with neural networks

We saw in the last chapter how we could create a nonlinear decision boundary by adding polynomial terms to our hypothesis function. We can also use this technique in linear regression to fit nonlinear data. However, this is not the ideal solution for a number of reasons. Firstly, we have to choose polynomial terms, and for complicated decision boundaries, this can be an imprecise and time-intensive process, which can take quite a bit of trial and error. We also need to consider what happens when we have a large number of features. It becomes difficult to understand exactly how added polynomial terms will change the decision boundary. It also means that the possible number of derived features will grow exponentially. To fit complicated boundaries, we will need many higher-order terms, and our model will become unwieldy, computationally expensive, and hard to understand.

Consider applications such as computer vision, where in a gray scale image, each pixel...