stance, Lippmann (1987) provides an excellent overview of
neural networks for the signal processing community. There
1. INTRODUCTION
Neural networks have recently received a great deal of at tention in many fields of study. The excitement stems from the fact that these networks are attempts to model the capa bilities of the human brain. People are naturally attracted by attempts to create human-like machines, a Frankenstein ob session, if you will. On a practical level the human brain has many features that are desirable in an electronic computer. The human brain has the ability to generalize from abstract ideas, recognize patterns in the presence of noise, quickly recall memories, and withstand localized damage. From a statistical perspective neural networks are interesting be cause of their potential use in prediction and classification problems.
Neural networks have been used for a wide variety of applications where statistical methods are traditionally em ployed. They have been used in classification problems such as identifying underwater sonar contacts (Gorman and Se-
are also a number of good introductory books on neural networks, with Hertz, Krogh, and Palmer (1991) providing
a good mathematical description, Smith (1993) explaining backpropagation in an applied setting, and Freeman (1994) using examples and code to explain neural networks. There have also been papers relating neural networks and statisti cal methods (Buntine and Weigend 1991; Ripley 1992; Sarle 1994; Werbos 1991). One of the best for a general overview is Ripley (1993).