Why do artificial neurons use a bias term? Shouldn't only using weights be enough?
The bias term in artificial neurons provides a way to shift the activation function to the left or right, regardless of the input. It allows the model to capture patterns that are not aligned with the origin, and it helps prevent the output of the activation function from being zero, even when all the inputs are zero. This is particularly important in deep networks, where multiple layers of neurons are connected to each other. Without the bias term, it would be more difficult for the network to learn complex relationships between inputs and outputs. Therefore, the use of bias terms can improve the representational power and generalization ability of artificial neural networks.