Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) crossed my mind this morning. They were big news a few years back. Whatever happened to them?

Turns out they are alive and well, but not the blessing that some thought them to be in stock trading.

Here are some notes from a blog by hassam.

"ANNs are widely used in a number of fields like finance, industry, agriculture, business, physics, statistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, weather forecasting, computer science and engineering, spatial analysis and geography. Some banks have found that the failure rate on loans approved by neural networks is lower than those approved by some of their best traditional methods. Some credit card companies are also using neural networks in their application screening process.

"One of the major areas, where a large part of ANN research is focused, is pattern matching. ... ANNs are extensively deployed for this task for they are capable of finding patterns in auditory data, analysing handwriting, comparing fingerprints, processing written and oral language and translating languages."

Lots of free ANN software is available. There's a list in Part 5 of the Usenet neural-nets FAQ.

Expanding their use is somewhat limited by the speed and size of available computers. Increasing the number of neurons simulated exponentially increases the computer power needed.