An ANN is a computational approach inspired by studies of the brain and nervous systems in
living organisms. It is believed that the powerful functionality of a biological neural system is
attributed to the parallel distributed processing nature of a network of cells, known as neurons.
An ANN emulates this structure by distributing the computation to small and simple processing
units, called artificial neurons, or nodes. With this architecture, an ANN has proven to be a
powerful mathematical model which excels at function approximation and pattern recognition.