What is the role of a hidden layer in an artificial neural network (ANN)?

It is responsible for passively reformatting data for use in the ANN.

It is responsible for making the final decision about how to label a record, based on weighted input from preceding layers.

It receives and weighs inputs from the preceding layer and produces outputs for the next layer.

It does not play a role during the forward pass of data through the ANN, but it helps to optimize during the backward pass.