How do I decide which Neural Network and learning method to use in a particular case?

Question

I am new in neural networks and I need to determine the pattern among a given set of inputs and outputs. So how do I decide which neural network to use for training or even which learning method to use? I have little idea about the pattern or relation between the given input and outputs.

Any sort of help will be appreciated. If you want me to read some stuff then it would be great if links are provided.

If any more info is needed plz say so.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Choosing the right neural networks is something of an art form. It's a bit difficult to give generic suggestions as the best NN for a situation will depend on the problem at hand. As with many of these problems neural netowrks may or may not be the best solution. I'd highly recommned trying out different networks and testing their performance vs a testing data set. When I did this I usually used the ANN tools though the R software package.

Also keep your mind open to other statistical learning techniques as well, things like decision trees and Support Vector Machines may be a better choice for some problems.

I'd suggest the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/Neural-Networks-Pattern-Recognition-Christopher/dp/0198538642

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/PRbook/#Contents