Glossary of “Neural” Terms

Abstract

The basic neural-network literature may already be familiar to a wide circle of scientists and engineers. Nonetheless, the true meaning of several concepts, never explicitly defined, may have escaped the attention of many readers. This chapter is therefore devoted to all those who always wanted to know about these definitions but were afraid to ask. This glossary is by no means exhaustive: it only serves the reading of this book, the literature references given, and other collateral texts. The definitions have been meant to be more explanatory than distinctive. Among alternative explanations, only those that are relevant to neurophysiology or ANNs have been given. The partial vocabularies picked up from artificial-intelligence techniques, biophysics, bionics, image analysis, linguistics, optics, pattern-recognition techniques, phonetics, psychology, and medical science are extremely concise. Mathematical concepts have also been explained in more detail in Chap. 1.