Methodology

Abstract

Methodology is the study of a whole body of methods used in a particular branch of activity. By this definition, we will not attempt to cover the complete methodology of applying neural networks to industrial applications, as we are not going to concern ourselves with the more detailed aspects of the implementation of neural networks. Thus we will not attempt to give more than the barest of statements concerning the detailed structure of nets: the numbers of nodes to use, the best learning algorithms, the most appropriate activation functions etc. We believe this would be unwise for a number of reasons: the detailed discussions derived from 3 years research and many different applications would be far too long; and, more significantly, we feel that any such conclusions would date rather rapidly as new techniques arise in the literature.