Practical introduction to artificial neural networks

Abstract : What are they ? What for are they ? How to use them ? This article wants to answer these three fundamental questions about artificial neural networks that every engineer interested by this machine learning technique asks to oneself. We present the most useful architectures. We explain how to train them using a supervised or an unsupervised learning depending on the task we want to do : regression, discrimination or clustering. What kind of data can one use and how to prepare them ? Finally, we will be interested to which confidence can we give to the observed results ?