  In recent days, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) can be applied to a vast
majority of fields including business, medicine, engineering, etc. The most
popular areas where ANN is employed nowadays are pattern and sequence
recognition, novelty detection, character recognition, regression analysis,
speech recognition, image compression, stock market prediction, Electronic
nose, security, loan applications, data processing, robotics, and control. The
benefits associated with its broad applications leads to increasing popularity
of ANN in the era of 21st Century. ANN confers many benefits such as organic
learning, nonlinear data processing, fault tolerance, and self-repairing
compared to other conventional approaches. The primary objective of this paper
is to analyze the influence of the hidden layers of a neural network over the
overall performance of the network. To demonstrate this influence, we applied
neural network with different layers on the MNIST dataset. Also, another goal
is to observe the variations of accuracies of ANN for different numbers of
hidden layers and epochs and to compare and contrast among them.
