Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide [Paperback]

Kevin Swingler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0126791708 | ISBN-13: 978-0126791709 | Publication Date: May 7, 1996 | Edition: Pap/Dsk

In this computer-based era, neural networks are an invaluable tool. They have been applied extensively in business forecasting, machine health monitoring, process control, and laboratory data analysis due to their modeling capabilities. There are numerous applications for neural networks, but a great deal of care and expertise is necessary to keep a neural-based project in working order.
This all-inclusive coverage gives you everything you need to put neural networks into practice. This informative book shows the reader how to plan, run, and benefit from a neural-based project without running into the roadblocks that often crop up. Theauthor uses the most popular type of neural network, the Multi-Layer Perceptron, and presents every step of its development. Each chapter presents a subsequent stage in network development through easy-to-follow discussion. Every decision and possible problem is considered in depth, and solutions are offered. The book includes a how-to-do-it reference section, and a set of worked examples. The second half of the book examines the sucessful application of neural networks in fields including signal processing, financial prediction, business decision support, and process monitoring and control. The book comes complete with a disk containing C and C++ programs to get you started.

Key Features
*Divides chapters into three sections for quick reference: Discussion, How to do it, and Examples
* Examines many case studies and real world examples to illustrate the methods presented
* Includes a disk with C and C++ programs which implement many of the techniques discussed in the text
* Allows the reader to devolop a neural network based solution

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kevin Swingler runs a successful neural engineering consulting company called Neural Innovation, a company which won the 1994 John Logie Baird Award for Innovation. The company was also awarded a SMART award in 1995 for a neural network based software package. Dr. Swingler is also involved with research and teaching at Stirling University in Scotland.

Product Details

• Paperback: 303 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; Pap/Dsk edition (May 7, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0126791708
• ISBN-13: 978-0126791709
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,423,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Commentary on Kevin Swingler's Applying Neural Networks, July 22, 2000

By 

Ian Bouystress "Ian B." (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide (Paperback)

Applying Neural Networks not only is a good review of the types of neural networks and and excellent discussion of how to design and implement them. It not only teaches how to select the type of neural net to use. What I loved most about this book was that it discussed with insightful, vivid details how to plan for, conceptualize, and prepare the neural net project long before selecting the actual type of network. It tells how and why to make the inquiries and choices you must make starting very early and at each stage of project development. For example, it discusses how to prepare data, how to choose data types, how to scale it, how to collect it, validation of it, data quality checking, and encoding it. Data quality and preparation are important keys to neural network success, like ingredients-preparation in cooking. Swingler shows why in an easy-to-understand manner. The book also discusses how to select project variables, outlier removal, the tradeoffs involved in network parameter selections, building training and test data, how to analyze outputs and errors, how to set stop-training criteria (and a host of other thresholds), how to visualize training data and error distributions in 2D and 3D, what derivatives are and what they mean, how to do project maintenance, how to adapt the network to external changes, and total project management. Some very good examples of neural network projects illustrate how various researchers implemented these choices. This book will tell you how to make some excellent choices in the design and running of a neural network project, as well as teach you why you are selecting between the alternatives. It is the only true,in-depth neural network methodology book I have found.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Much more theoretical than practical, February 15, 2001

By 

T. Isaac (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide (Paperback)

This book reads like a doctoral thesis. The neural network theory presented is quite complete, if difficult to wade through. Having "practical" in its title, I expected far better examples on the accompanying disk. However, the source code came with no make files and no sample data. Many syntax errors quickly became apparent when I tried to incorporate the code into a project (unmatched parentheses, use of undeclared variables, etc.). Once I fixed those, bugs in the code began to surface, such as closing the output file after calling "return" and other serious bugs. It is clear that the code has never been actually tested. To summarize, if you already know something about neural networks and want to get deeper into the theory and formulas, this may be the book for you. But it certainly will NOT get you started writing an NN application without considerable effort and additional research.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the deepest book on the subject, September 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Applying Neural Networks: A Practical Guide (Paperback)

This book is a fairly easy read. About no mathematical blobs thrown around, and still it contains a great deal of information. While you will find truly deep books on neural networks, at least this is a book you will have a reasonable chance from start to finish.. And you will probably end up understanding most of it. Of course , it is an advantage to understand the backpropagation algorithm before buying this book (and also understand the math behind it), but it should contain all needed information. But be prepared to look at the references if you are going to implement a specific "not very standard" algorithm. Most of the papers are on the internet, so it shouldnt be a problem.

The book only talks about feedforward and recurrent ANNs, using gradient descent seach ( Like backpropagation). It does not cover any unsupervised learning or GA training algorith. But if your field is supervised learning, this is a helpfull book for you.

I havent looked at the software, and probably wont. If you want to truly understand ANN, implement the algorithms yourself.