As defined in Eq. 7.2, z is just a real valued number. Finally, instead of using z, a linear function of x, as the output, neural units apply a non-linear function f to z. We will refer to the output of this function as the activation value for the unit, a. Since we are just modeling a single unit, the activation activation for the node is in fact the final output of the network, which we'll generally call y. So the value y is defined as: