Neural networks: friends or foes?

There has been enormous interest over the past decade in the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for data processing applications. By and large, this interest has been well‐founded. ANNs, however, offer no panacea to the data analyst. They are as prone to misuse as any other method and the details of their functioning are often clouded in mystique. This has made a firm understanding of their functioning difficult. Presents a brief introduction to the most widely applied class of ANN, the feed‐forward network. Gives an overview of its functioning for both classification and regression problems.