Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are computational
techniques that present a mathematical model inspired by the
neural structure of biological organisms, acquiring knowledge
through experience which have been applied widely in several
tasks such as control, prediction of weather and climate, data
assimilation, optimization, image processing and others. ANNs
have emerged as excellent tools for deriving data oriented
models, due to their inherent characteristic of plasticity
that permits the adaptation of the learning task when data
is provided. In addition to plasticity, ANNs also present
generalization and fault tolerance characteristics that are
fundamental for systems that depend on observational data that
may be incomplete and slightly different from the data used
to derive the models.