Modern neural networks are trained using backpropagation[2][3][4][5][6] and are colloquially referred to as "vanilla" networks.[7] MLPs grew out of an effort to improve single-layer perceptrons, which could only be applied to linearly separable data. A perceptron traditionally used a Heaviside step function as its nonlinear activation function. However, the backpropagation algorithm requires that modern MLPs use continuous activation functions such as sigmoid or ReLU.[8]
Multilayer perceptrons form the basis of deep learning,[9] and are applicable across a vast set of diverse domains.[10]
^Linnainmaa, Seppo (1970). The representation of the cumulative rounding error of an algorithm as a Taylor expansion of the local rounding errors (Masters) (in Finnish). University of Helsinki. pp. 6–7.
^Rumelhart, David E., Geoffrey E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams. "Learning Internal Representations by Error Propagation". David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland, and the PDP research group. (editors), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition, Volume 1: Foundation. MIT Press, 1986.
^Hastie, Trevor. Tibshirani, Robert. Friedman, Jerome. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Springer, New York, NY, 2009.