This write-up is especially for those who want to try their hands at coding an Artificial Neural Net. How it is done mathematically doesn’t need an explanation from someone like me who is a programmer and not a scientist or a researcher. There are numerous training videos that you can go through and learn. I have gone through Prof Patrick Winston’s class as part of MIT OpenCourseWare and understood how the feed-forward and back-propagation technique works.
Through this article, I will explain the steps that you will need to follow to build a fully configurable ANN program (with N number of input features, N number of hidden layers, N number of neurons in each hidden layer, N number of output neurons). I would encourage to write your own custom program following the steps. As long as we adhere to the best practices of programming, test its efficiency, performance, we are good to go.