title: Neural Network Inputs and Outputs to meaningful values
body: <p>I'm trying to determine how to transform my "meaningful input" into data for an Artificial Neural Network and how to turn the output into "meaningful output".</p>
  
  <p>The way I can always see of doing it is by convering everything to categories with binary values.</p>
  
  <p>For example, rather than outputting age, having a 0-1 for &lt;10, a 0-1 for 10 - 19, etc.</p>
  
  <p>Same with the inputs, where I might be using for example, hair colour. Is the only way to turn this into input to have Blonde 0-1, Brown 0-1, etc?</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing some entire topic of ANNs? Most of the books and similar I read use theoretical examples.</p>