The two assumptions we need about the cost function
The goal of backpropagation is to compute the partial derivatives ∂C/∂w∂C/∂w and ∂C/∂b∂C/∂b of the cost function CC with respect to any weight ww or bias bb in the network. For backpropagation to work we need to make two main assumptions about the form of the cost function. Before stating those assumptions, though, it's useful to have an example cost function in mind. We'll use the quadratic cost function from last chapter (c.f. Equation (6)). In the notation of the last section, the quadratic cost has the form