Neural Networks & data prediction

[e-girl]

hi all,,

I'm working on a project where I'm given a scattered data and using Neural Networks I'm supposed to find an output when given a certain input not in the given data.

I'm not familiar with Neural Networks but I guess that it should come up with a formula that best describes the scattered data and hence estimate the output of the given input.

But I don't know how it works! and how am I supposed to input my scattered data to get the formula describing this data!!

Plz help..

[e-girl]

[FishGuy]

Hi e-girl I think the problem may be that it's probably not much of a database issue. You are probably only going to store your training data in a database but the clever stuff will be done elsewhere. I would suggest you try in the maths forum for advice on the equations and possibly the vb forum for finding a way to implement it.

[si_the_geek]

Thread moved to General Developer - hopefully somebody with relevant knowledge will see it here!

[SeanK]

What is a neural network?

[Shaggy Hiker]

I currently have a program that does something like that using an evolutionary algorithm rather than a neural net. The user enters a bunch of observations, and the variables that the person thinks creates the observed pattern. The program then evolves the relationship between the variables that matches the output.

Sounds fairly similar to what you are trying to do. What's it for? Not exactly a simple program, from the sounds of it.

[Hack]

Is this an Artificial Intelligence kind of thing?

[Negative0]

I implemented a neural net for one of my AI classes a few years back and it wasn't too hard to get working so-so, but it was kind of hard to get it working right. The worst thing was, it was very slow to train, so if I wanted to try something new, I would have to train it for quite a while to get accurate results.

Of couse, if nothing changes, you can save your node states out to a file and you would not have to retrain between tests, but more often than not, you are modifying something that would require re-training.

Wikipedia has a decent write up of what a Neural Network is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network

You could probably pick up any computer science AI book and they would have some examples of Neural Nets. Plus if I remember correctly I followed a C example I found on the web, which really led to my understanding of neural nets.

[e-girl]

heeey, thank you guyz

well, my observations are dates vs. traffic.. and i'm supposed to find out (predict) the traffic value on a date that is not in my observations, for example traffic after a year...

can I use neural net. to get this output? if so is it implementable using VB??

thanx again

[Negative0]

Well you'd probably be better off breaking your input into Month, Day, and DayofWeek, versus traffic. This would let you correlate the Month/Day (ignoring the year) and dayofweek, to determine the accurate traffic volume.

I was able to implement a Neural Net in VB.Net based on a C example I found somewhere on the web. It can be done, you just need to implement the Neural Net algorithm in your VB code. My neural net was very similar to what you have to do, it took the date (day and month) the day of the week, current inventory and a few other items to guess the amount a plant would have to manufacture in a given day.

[Shaggy Hiker]

It certainly can be done.

Is this some class thing, or a speculative job assignment?

[namrekka]

http://www.dspguide.com/ch26.htm

[e-girl]

thanx guyz

this is a job assignment, but i'm new to vb so still trying to figure out how to make it work, and to find the proper algorithm to implement the neural net. using vb..

Negative0 not sure i got u well, but what you've done seems very similar to what i'm trying to do

thanx namrekka for the file, i'm downloading it

[mebhas]

i remember seeing something of a neural network in the planetsourcecode or devx(not sure), a fully implemented working code in vb. and there is a neural network discussion in neworder.box.sk. thats all i can say for now. have an idea of how to implement it but have never actually worked with it.

[FishGuy]

http://www.pcquest.com/content/Devel.../105100101.asp