Approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are emitted on a daily basis, and this has brought the world into the era of ''big data.'' Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are known for their effectiveness and efficiency for small datasets, and this era of big data has posed a challenge to the big data analytics using ANN. Recently, much research effort has been devoted to the application of the ANN in big data analytics and is still ongoing, although it is in it is early stages. The purpose of this paper is to summarize recent progress, challenges, and opportunities for future research. This paper presents a concise view of the state of the art, challenges, and future research opportunities regarding the applications of the ANN in big data analytics and reveals that progress has been made in this area. Our review points out the limitations of the previous approaches, the challenges in the ANN approaches in terms of their applications in big data analytics, and several ANN architecture that have not yet been explored in big data analytics and opportunities for future research. We believe that this paper can serve as a yardstick for future progress on the applications of the ANN in big data analytics as well as a starting point for new researchers with an interest in the exploration of the ANN in big data analytics. INDEX TERMS Big data analytics, artificial neural networks, evolutionary neural network, convolutional neural network, dataset. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Shirui Pan. many organizations on an ongoing basis. These datasets are being collected from various sources, including but not limited to the World Wide Web (WWW), social networks and sensor networks [3]. The discovery of knowledge from unstructured data accumulated from the WWW remains a difficult task because the content is suitable for human consumption rather than for machines [4]. Experimental evidence has shown that if big datasets are exploited and managed properly, it can give rise to critical intelligence that can motivate informed decisions and