NeuroSolutions is a neural network development environment developed by

NeuroDimension NeuroDimension, Inc. was a software company specializing in neural networks, adaptive systems, and genetic optimization and made software tools for developing and implementing these artificial intelligence technologies. NeuroSolutions is a gene ...

. It combines a modular, icon-based (

component-based Component-based software engineering (CBSE), also called component-based development (CBD), is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns with respect to the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a give ...

) network design interface with an implementation of advanced learning procedures, such as conjugate gradients, Levenberg-Marquardt and backpropagation through time. The software is used to design, train and deploy neural network (

supervised learning Supervised learning (SL) is a machine learning paradigm for problems where the available data consists of labelled examples, meaning that each data point contains features (covariates) and an associated label. The goal of supervised learning alg ...

and

unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a type of algorithm that learns patterns from untagged data. The hope is that through mimicry, which is an important mode of learning in people, the machine is forced to build a concise representation of its world and t ...

) models to perform a wide variety of tasks such as data mining, classification,

function approximation In general, a function approximation problem asks us to select a function among a that closely matches ("approximates") a in a task-specific way. The need for function approximations arises in many branches of applied mathematics, and comput ...

, multivariate regression and time-series prediction.

Neural network construction wizards

NeuroSolutions provides three separate wizards for automatically building neural network models:

Data Manager

The Data Manager module allows the user to import data from

Microsoft Access Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools (not to be confused with the old Microsoft Access ...

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for App ...

or text files and perform various preprocessing and data analysis operations. From the Data Manager, the user can load the data directly into a NeuroSolutions breadboard or use the data to create a new neural network.

NeuralBuilder

The NeuralBuilder centers the design specifications on the specific neural network architecture the user wishes to build. Some of the most common architectures include: *

Multilayer perceptron A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a fully connected class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). The term MLP is used ambiguously, sometimes loosely to mean ''any'' feedforward ANN, sometimes strictly to refer to networks composed of mul ...

(MLP) * Generalized feedforward *

Modular (programming) Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functio ...

* Jordan/Elman * Principal component analysis (PCA) *

Radial basis function network In the field of mathematical modeling, a radial basis function network is an artificial neural network that uses radial basis functions as activation functions. The output of the network is a linear combination of radial basis functions of the inp ...

(RBF) * General regression neural network (GRNN) * Probabilistic neural network (PNN) *

Self-organizing map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the t ...

(SOM) * Time-lag recurrent network (TLRN) *

Recurrent neural network A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...

* CANFIS network ( Fuzzy logic) * Support vector machine (SVM) Once the neural network architecture is selected, the user can customize parameters such as the number of hidden layers, the number of processing elements and the learning algorithm. If the user is unsure what the parameters should be set to, a genetic algorithm can be used to optimize the settings.

NeuralExpert

The NeuralExpert centers the design specifications around the type of problem the user would like the neural network to solve ( Classification, Prediction,

Function approximation In general, a function approximation problem asks us to select a function among a that closely matches ("approximates") a in a task-specific way. The need for function approximations arises in many branches of applied mathematics, and comput ...

or Clustering). Given this problem type and the size of the user's data set, the NeuralExpert intelligently selects the neural network size and architecture that will likely produce a good solution. There is also an optional beginner level that hides some of the more advanced operations such as cross validation and genetic optimization.

User-defined neural networks

NeuroSolutions is based on the concept that neural networks can be broken down into a fundamental set of neural components. Individually these components are relatively simplistic, but several components connected together can result in networks capable of solving very complex problems. The network construction wizards will connect these components based on the user's specifications. However, once the network is built the interconnections can be arbitrarily changed and components can be added or removed. NeuroSolutions will also allow you to integrate your own algorithms through dynamic link libraries ( DLL). Every NeuroSolutions component implements a function conforming to a simple protocol in C. To add a new component you simply modify the template function for the base component and compile the code into a DLL.

Neural network deployment

NeuroDimension, Inc. provides three ways for NeuroSolutions to deploy a custom neural network solution to your application:

Code generation

NeuroSolutions can automatically generate

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

source code for a neural network designed within its graphical user interface. This provides the flexibility to customize the neural network code for the particular application. Since the generated code is

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

-compliant, the user can deploy the neural network solution to other platforms such as

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

DLL generation

The Custom Solution Wizard is an optional add-on product that will take a neural network designed within NeuroSolutions and encapsulate it into a

dynamic link library Dynamic-link library (DLL) is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. These libraries usually have the file extension DLL, OCX (for libraries containing ActiveX controls), or ...

( DLL) that conforms to a simple protocol. The DLL can then be embedded into the users own

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic ( ...

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

( ASP) application. The key advantage to this approach is that the user does not need to be an advanced programmer to use it.

OLE automation

This technology provides the ability to programmatically control NeuroSolutions from any external application that supports

Automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

, such as

, and applications developed with

Visual C++ Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++ and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available in both tri ...

. In the simplest case, the application developer could send NeuroSolutions the data to process, tell it to begin processing, and then retrieve the results back into the application. Because of its extensive protocol, NeuroSolutions could be instructed to do much more complex tasks.